Scar Tissue
by 8sword
Summary: “You don’t have a gun,” Uzumaki said. Sakura had taken the clip out of her hair and had it in her mouth to give herself a French braid. She glanced sideways at him and said, around the clip, “Are you offering me yours?” An AU forensic mystery.
1. Chapter 1

**Title:** Scar Tissue

**Author:** 8sword

**Date:** 2.9.10,

**Revised**: 2.22.10. A huge thank you to JadeEye, who re-edited these first three chapters to me. There were so many mistakes! How did you all bear it?

**Summary**: An unsettling new case and an even more unsettling new ANBU agent inject chaos into forensic anthropologist Haruno Sakura's methodical life.

**Author's Notes:** This story is heavily influenced on the TV show _Bones._ All forensic and terminology come from it or the forensic anthropology survey course I took a while back.

**Disclaimer: ** Masashi Kishimoto owns Naruto.

-

"Billowing on the innominate bone indicates an age between mid fifties and early sixties. Subject was definitely a male. Wear on the carpals and metacarpals indicates that he was left-handed, and the fillings in the back molars match the dental records for Senator Kaze."

Haruno Sakura snapped the file folder shut and looked up, her shoulders drawing back and spine straightening as she was accustomed to doing when speaking to higher-ranking officers – in this case, her boss.

However, unlike she was used to doing, she spoke to him with annoyance that she intended to be quite obvious. "Begging your pardon, sir, but I fail to see why this case demanded my attention. The car in which the remains were found belonged to Senator Kaze, the serial numbers on both of the victim's hip replacements match those on record for the senator, and the death was clearly caused by blunt-force trauma associated with a car accident. One of the grad assistants could easily have dealt with this, and I could have worked on that stabbing case."

Dr. Sarutobi sighed, rubbing his forehead with an age-spotted hand. "That case is in Sand Country, Dr. Haruno. Do I need to remind you that you are a forensic anthropologist employed by the _Leaf_ government?"

"A forensic anthropologist employed by the Leaf government who could have improved Leaf Country's relationship with the Sand Country's medical examiner's office," said Sakura. "All they wanted was my help in identifying unusual striations in the kerf marks from a knife."

Sarutobi sighed again, but his eyes twinkled. "Would it help if I said I didn't send you to help Sand because I've just received another case for you to work on?"

"It would if the case involves someone who died at someone else's hands and not just some bastard who killed himself from drunken driving," said Sakura, giving a meaningful glance to the senator's remains on the examination table. "Sir."

Sarutobi gave her a stern look, but the cough he covered with his hand was indisputably a chuckle. "An ANBU agent will arrive with the remains some time this afternoon. Until then, why don't you go enjoy some lunch?"

"Yes, Dr. Haruno, why don't we enjoy some lunch?" The familiar soft voice came from behind Sakura.

She turned to see her colleague, Sai, standing on the steps to the autopsy platform.

He was smirking vaguely. "I promise a show."

Sarutobi groaned. "I don't want to know."

He headed quickly past Sai down the stairs.

Sakura waited until their supervisor was gone to return Sai's smile.

"What'd you do this time?" she asked, peeling off her latex gloves.

Sai inclined his head, twirling a pen in his fingers. He worked in facial reconstruction, as well as crime scene photography and sketching, and she couldn't remember ever seeing him without some sort of writing implement in hand, even when he had worked briefly under her as a graduate assistant several years ago.

"You know that Shino's giant cockroach apparently escaped from its container this morning?"

Sakura rolled her eyes. "How could I not have noticed?"

Their resident forensic entomologist, a man only five years older than herself and Sai but "much more dignified," according to Dr. Sarutobi, had nearly sent her into cardiac arrest earlier that morning. She had taken a step away from the examining table for another pair of gloves and seen Shino on his hands and knees underneath the tables' legs.

Sakura had nearly kicked him in the face with her high-heeled boots. If she hadn't known from working with him for a year that female fruit flies interested him more than any female _Homo sapien_, she would have proclaimed his robotically delivered explanation that he was checking under the autopsy table for his giant cockroach a giant load of bullshit and kicked him all the way to Water Country.

She saw no need to explain all this to Sai, however, so she just asked, as she came down the steps toward him, "What'd you do to it?"

Sai said nothing, merely let his smile curve a little higher. Then he opened the door to the lounge and stepped back to let her go through.

It was empty. Sakura opened the refrigerator to take out her bottle of iced tea and heard another set of footsteps following Sai's into the lounge.

She turned around and saw that the footsteps belonged to Shino. The dark-haired entomologist still had his safety goggles strapped on. He frequently forgot to take them off, and rarely was anyone brave enough to tell him he was still wearing them. Settling into a chair at the table and propping her foot on the legs of a chair across from her, Sakura watched as Shino took his customary bagged lunch from the fridge.

She glanced at Sai and saw him perfectly blank and smooth-faced, which, she knew, was much more indicative of impending calamity than any smile.

She returned her eyes to Shino just in time to see him open the plasticware containing his daily mustard-and-roast-beef sandwich.

He lifted it to his mouth with his usual slow, deliberate movements and bit down.

Sakura blanched.

Roast beef should definitely _not_ have the two dark antenna she saw poking out from between Shino's lips.

With a movement as unhurried as before, Shino put his sandwich down. He opened his mouth and pulled out the bit of sandwich that he had bitten off. He peeled the top layer of bread from it.

The dark shape lying there twitched and exploded into motion.

Sakura shrieked and scrambled out of her chair as the cockroach zoomed angrily into the air like a fat, black bomber plane.

It swooped close to her face, and she shrieked again, angrily this time, ordering Shino to catch the damn thing as Sai's loud laughter filled the air.

Ducking, breathing hard, she yanked open the lounge room door and scrambled out, slamming the door behind her.

"Sai!" she bellowed through the door, through which she could hear Shino's monotoned threats to infest Sai's office with a sample of pubic lice he had from one of his investigations if he ever kidnapped his cockroach again. "FORGET SHINO'S THREATS, I'LL MAKE SURE YOU DON'T HAVE ANYTHING FOR THE PUBIC LICE TO INFEST!"

As her shout echoed down the sterile corridor, the humor of the situation hit her.

She began to laugh, tears running from her eyes, until her abdominal muscles ached. He'd put the roach in Shino's _sandwich_, for God's sake –

Footsteps raced down the hall. Then a voice shouted, "Stand down! AN – "

Sakura's eyes registered the handgun. Then they registered her leg spinning out to kick the gun from the hands which held it, and her hand seizing the arm to which the hands belonged and wrenching it in a Dragon Twist.

The gun clattered to the floor.

" – BU," finished a strained voice next to her ear.

Sakura registered two things simultaneously: a) the handgun on the floor was a .40 mm, a caliber most commonly issued to law enforcement. And b) AN + BU = ANBU.

"Oops," she heard herself say as her eyes flicked up and met two wincing blue eyes.

Wincing herself, she released the arm that she had been gripping and took a step back.

The man she had just released was wearing a standard issue black suit with white uniform shirt. But he didn't look like any of the other ANBU agents for whom she had worked cases. Those agents had all been nondescript, dark-haired and dark-eyed like her own colleagues.

This one had swapped his standard-issue dark tie for a bright orange one, and his hair was just as bright, a loud yellow that could barely even be called blond.

She was hardly one to talk about unnatural hair colors herself, but she felt her eyebrow lifting as she eyed the bright spiky hair and wondered if perhaps it was still dyed from an undercover mission or something. Her brow rose even further as she realized how young the agent appeared, the skin of his face fresh and smooth except some scar tissue above both zygomatic arches.

She took in all this in a few seconds, and then her visual inspection was interrupted by a shout.

"Agent Uzumaki!"

She recognized Dr. Sarutobi's voice even before the elderly man came hurrying around the corner of the hallway. He stopped short when he saw them. His eyes flicked first to Sakura, then to the ANBU agent, then to the handgun on the floor between their feet.

"Ah," he panted, managing to sound dry even then. "Well, I _did_ ask you to wait for me, Agent Uzumaki."

"When people in my line of work hear screaming, we usually run first and ask questions later." Uzumaki's voice was as young as his face and had a playful tone that matched the smile that now curved his mouth. He stooped to pick up the gun and slide it back into the holster at his belt, then glanced up at Sakura with his blue eyes. "You were the one screaming, right?"

On her face, Sakura could feel both the weight of Sarutobi's eyes and the heat of intense embarrassment. Damn it, she would kill Sai later. To think that an ANBU agent had heard her shrieking like a schoolgirl over a stupid _cockroach_ and now she would have to _explain_ it –

The lounge door clicked open.

Sai stepped out, then stopped short at the tableau in front of him.

Shino brushed past him, gave the group of people a single disinterested glance from behind his goggles, and headed down the hallway.

Sakura glared after him.

"Why were you screaming, Sakura?" prompted Sarutobi.

"She saw a cockroach," said Sai without the slightest bit of perturbation. "Don't worry, Dr. Haruno," he said, coming up behind her and giving her a pat on the shoulder. "Shino caught it. You're safe now."

Sakura smiled sweetly and stepped backward, grinding her heel into his metatarsals. To Sai's credit, his gentle smile didn't waver.

But he did make a rather interesting sound.

"If the two of you are through," said Sarutobi. The expression on his face made it clear he saw through both of them even if the ANBU agent's forehead was creased with puzzlement. "Dr. Haruno, this is Agent Uzumaki."

Sakura was still feeling highly mortified, and when she felt mortified, she got bitchy.

"A pleasure, I'm sure," she said shortly, barely sparing him a glance. She looked at Sarutobi instead. "Where are the remains?"

-

The remains were waiting in a biohazard container the size of a garbage can in front of the steps to her autopsy platform. Two ANBU crime scene techs stood on either side of it like sentries and snapped to straight-spined attention when the group of Sakura, Sai, Sarutobi, and the ANBU agent approached.

"Sir," they said to Uzumaki, who grinned at them and waved at them to lower their hands from their salutes.

Sakura swiped her identification badge through the security reader mounted next to the steps and watched as the two techs, after a gesture from Uzumaki, hefted the container up the steps.

Rolling up the sleeves of her red lab coat, she directed them to the last of the three examination tables on the platform and plucked two pairs of latex gloves from the canister fastened to the railing that encircled the platform.

She pulled them on. "When were the remains found?"

"Yesterday." Uzumaki had followed her up the stairs and now stood with his hands in his pockets. "A kid in Konoha-cho found them while he was rooting around in a Dumpster for dinner."

Sai already had a digital camera ready in his hands. "Guess he won't be getting his meals from that Dumpster anymore."

Sakura did not laugh. She watched Uzumaki from beneath her bangs as she pretended to adjust her gloves.

He, she noticed, did not laugh either.

She dismissed the matter for the moment, put a mask over her nose and mouth so that she wouldn't exhale her DNA onto the canister's contents, and began to undo the latches that kept the canister shut and air-tight.

"Were pictures taken of the Dumpster?"

Uzumaki drew a compact disc out of the inside of his suit. "They're on this, with the kid's statement. We got picture of the alley, too, and it's still marked off in case we need to go back to it."

This was useless, Sakura knew. A bit of yellow ANBU tape didn't do anything in normal parts of the city to deter people from entering the marked-off area; in Little Konoha, it would be practically as though it didn't even exist.

She opened her mouth to tell him this. But, remembering how he had called the child from Konoha-chou, as it was less favorably known, a "kid" instead of a "cho-ho" the way most people did, she realized that he might be well enough acquainted with the area that informing him of this obvious piece of information would only make her look stupid. She shut her mouth.

It still rankled, though. The lab should have been called as soon as the body was found so that she, Sai, and Shino could have gone to examine the area themselves for evidence and make sure nothing was missed.

She'd had this argument with Sarutobi many times. He had told her that he, too, had had this argument with his ANBU liaison. But ANBU absolutely refused to let forensic specialists into their crime scenes.

Sakura had never had much respect for ANBU, with their holier-than-thou, top-secret behavior, acting as though they were so much higher than a normal soldier, who risked just as much, and the thought of it unconsciously made her brows dig into her eyes as she watched Uzumaki. Calling the Konoha-cho child a "kid" was probably nothing more than a fluke.

"I had the pictures e-mailed to Sarutobi, too, so they should be on your server," said the agent. He set the compact disc on the metal desk in the corner, where several computers sat.

Sakura realized, seeing her reflection in the monitor's dark screen-saver, that she was quite obviously glaring at him, and she forced her face blank again, looking down at the container.

With a final snap, Sakura pulled open its lid.

The stomach-wringing stench of cadaverine and putrescine hit her full in the face, as though her mask wasn't even there. A few flies buzzed up in its wake.

She clamped her lips shut even tighter, but the odor slicked itself along her tongue anyway.

The body inside was still fully articulated, placed upright. It might have been someone playing hide-and-go-seek in the canister if not for the fly eggs whitening the orifices of the face and the mottled green color of the flesh where it had not been torn by sharp-force trauma.

Over her shoulder, she heard the sound of Sai's camera shutter clicking as he took photographs. Without needing to be asked, Shino stepped forward and bottled a half dozen of the flies that had buzzed out of the container when Sakura opened it, then leaned past her to scrape several of the maggots and eggs from the skull into test tubes.

"Shizune should be dealing with this body," Sakura muttered, although she knew it was useless.

The body was still covered in flesh, and Sakura was a forensic anthropologist, which meant she specialized in recognizing trauma on _bone_. Shizune, the head forensic pathologist, dealt with flesh. But she had been lent out to Sand Country and would not be back for several days, if not longer.

Sakura motioned the ANBU techs forward. "I'm going to need one of you to help me lift this."

"Only one of us?" said the black-haired one, glancing at his partner.

"Only one," said Sakura shortly.

The one who had spoken stepped forward.

"Fresh gloves," Sakura ordered. He complied. "Okay, on three." She gently grasped under the corpse's shoulders, distributing the weight as evenly across her palms and fingers as she could so as to avoid inflicting postmortem trauma on the corpse and breaking it out of rigor mortis. "One, two, three – "

With twin grunts, she and the tech lifted the body out of the canister and onto the stainless steel surface.

Sakura had seen countless bodies fixed by rigor mortis into strange poses. But never one quite like this.

The body – she was fairly certain, based merely on the clothing and body structure, that it was male – lay on its back, its knees drawn up to its chest with its toes pointing inward in a textbook example of the fully flexed position. His head bowed forward with the black-hair, white insect eggs sprinkled throughout it, still hanging down and catching in the trauma-scored flesh of his shoulders. His arms hung to his side like a gorilla that moved by pressing its knuckles into the ground.

The stance was indicative of a limpness at the time of death, as though he had been unconscious, and the dark lividity across the knuckles indicated that he had been in a confined space – something like this container, perhaps, or an actual trash can, before ending up in the Dumpster.

Sai slowly circled the table, snapping shots from each angle. Sakura peeled off her first two layers of gloves, dropped them in the biohazards box, and grabbed a fresh file folder and set of autopsy forms. She began cataloguing the victim's clothing and personal artifacts so that she could move on to breaking the body out of rigor mortis to place it in anatomical position for X-rays and trauma analysis.

Behind her, she vaguely heard Sarutobi telling Uzumaki that the team would contact him as soon as they had a biological profile for the victim. But even that vague awareness melted away as she began to fall into the familiar rhythm of the autopsy.

-

A/N: According to wikipedia, "cho" can be added to the end of a neighborhood's name to indicate it is a division of a larger city. So think of "Konoha-cho" as "Little Konoha," like "Little Tokyo."

Is the story worth continuing?


	2. Chapter 2

**Title:** Scar Tissue

**Author:** 8sword

**Chapter:** 2

**Date:** 2.12.10

**Revised: **2.22.10

**Summary**: An unsettling new case and an even more unsettling new ANBU agent inject chaos into forensic anthropologist Haruno Sakura's methodical life.

**Author's Notes:** I'll be taking a little liberty with Japanese language and culture in these next few chapters. Sorry. And thanks to everyone for the amazing responses to this story!

**Disclaimer: ** Masashi Kishimoto owns Naruto.

-

Ten hours after the ANBU tech helped her lift the victim's body onto the autopsy table, Sakura knew that the victim was male, approximately twenty to twenty-six years old, and, judging from the wear visible on his coccyx in the X-rays, had sat Indian-style for long periods of time.

Shino's examination of the fly eggs wouldn't be final until the next day, but his preliminary results and Sakura's examination of the body's decomposition placed the postmortem interval at less than a week.

Breaking the victim out of rigor mortis had taken Sakura so long that she had not gotten very far in determining cause and nature of death. But she was willing to bet her whole treasured supply of Silver Needle Tea that they were related to the extensive sharp force trauma to the body's abdomen. Decomposition and fly colonization usually started in the soft orifices of the body, like the mouth, eyes, ears, and genitals, and took much longer to spread to the rest of the body. But the fly colonization and decomposition had been as extensive in the victim's abdomen as to his facial orifices, if not even more so. He had sustained serious damage there. Sakura would be better able to tell just how serious it was if she could deflesh the body and see what marks the weapon had made on the bone tissue.

Still, even if she hadn't managed to concretely identify cause of death, Sai had managed to pull the remains of a tattoo from the flaccid flesh on the victim's arm. The shape had been distorted by bloating that set in with decomposition, but Sai had run it through a computer imager and gotten a clearer shape that looked like a chess piece.

They had sent the JPEGS of the tattoo, plus Sai's sketch and verbal description, to Uzumaki, along with photos of several other personal artifacts, like the small ivory earring from the body's left earlobe.

By the time Sakura had finished all the paperwork and autopsy sketches, it was ten o'clock, and even Shino the Night Owl had left.

She smiled a tired goodbye at the security guard on duty at the front desk and pushed out the door into muggy August air. It tasted of car exhaust and smog–unpleasant, but a welcome relief from the stench of decaying body and latex gloves.

It had been a while since Sakura had spent such a long, uninterrupted chunk of time hunched over the autopsy table. She could practically feel that her spine warping into some acquired type of scoliosis. She rolled her shoulders as she straightened up behind the steering wheel of her car and decided, as she rolled up to the intersection, to turn left toward the dojo instead of right, toward her apartment.

As she pulled into the plaza's parking lot, she saw Lee opening the dojo door and turning to lock it.

She jumped out of the car. "Lee! Wait!"

The black-haired man looked up, shifting his cane under his arm as he turned to see her.

"Sakura!" he exclaimed, his heavy brows lifting with surprise. "To what do I owe this welcome surprise?"

"One spar?" she panted as she came to a stop in front of him. God, she needed to start coming to work out more often. She'd let things slide with Shizune being out of the lab. "Please?"

"Of course, Sakura." Lee put his keys back in his pockets and pushed the door open for her. "How could I deny a spar to a friend who looks to be in such desperate need of some rejuvenating flames of youth?"

Sakura ducked under his arm, flipping the light switch and illuminating the mirror-lined room with its mat-covered floors. "Is it just me, or did that sound like an insult?"

"I would never dream of insulting my dear friend," said Lee in a voice so hurt and innocent that had Sakura not known him for several years and been able to recognize the playful tilt of his heavy eyebrows, she might have apologized for suspecting him. "After all, to call you old would be to imply that Tenten is ancient, and I am fond of my eyebrows as they are."

Sakura laughed. In addition to being Lee's fiancée, Tenten was Sakura's best friend, and Sakura knew quite well of the older woman's tendency to threaten Lee with plucking off his eyebrows while he slept if he did anything to annoy her.

"Have you talked to her lately?" she asked, crouching down to untie her sneakers.

"A week ago." Lee hobbled to the counter, leaning against it so he could take off his own shoes. "It is monsoon season, and the storms have knocked down many of the Rain County's phone lines. She asked how you were faring."

He had probably rephrased Tenten's words, Sakura knew. Tenten had probably said something more like, 'Sakura better be doing something damn important since she hasn't had the time to write to me in two months."

"I'll try to send her an e-mail tonight," Sakura promised, wincing internally.

Lee smiled easily. "I know she will glad to hear from you."

-

Years ago, after a land mine went off near Lee's unit in Sand Country, shredding open his leg with a rain of shrapnel, the army physicians had predicted that he would never regain use of his leg. In other words, he was useless to the army, and he had been discharged, albeit with honors, at about the same time as Sakura had been.

The doctors had been right; he had never regained total use of his leg. It still dragged behind him when he walked. But Lee had powered past it the same way he had powered through the rain of shrapnel that disabled him, carrying a wounded Sand village child over his shoulder. In the dojo he had started, he moved more rapidly than any of his students or fellow instructors, and Sakura, by the end of half an hour's spar, was soaked with sweat and throbbing with bruises.

Lee was barely perspiring. He handed her a towel from one of the shelves, smiling. "Your springtime of youth is wilting, Sakura. You must come to the dojo more often and water it so that your skills may grow strong and tall."

Sakura snorted at him. "Tenten would so punch you if she was here."

"Yes," said Lee fondly. "She would."

Sakura tossed the towel in the laundry basket by the wall and grabbed her bag. "Thanks, Lee. Springtime of youth aside, I feel much better."

"It was my pleasure, Sakura." He followed her to the door, switching off the lights and locking the door behind them. "Allow me to walk you to your car."

Sakura glanced at him, brow furrowing, eyes flicking involuntarily to his cane. "Aren't you parked in back? You don't have to come with me. It's just right there." She inclined her head toward where her dark red two-door sat in the empty lot, only ten meters away.

Lee, ever stoic, acted as though he had not seen her glance at his cane. "I will walk you to your car, Sakura. I will not be dissuaded."

"Why the sudden chivalry?" Sakura teased.

She was only partly joking. Lee was the most polite person she knew, but this sort of chivalry seemed like overkill considering that Lee had seen her in action both in the dojo and when they shared a platoon. He knew better than anyone that she was capable of taking care of a pickpocket, which was about the only threat that might pop up in the ten meters between the front door of the dojo and her car.

But Lee frowned quite seriously.

"Some of my students from Konoha-cho have been talking," he said. "They will not stay out past nightfall anymore. It is probably nothing, but one dodge is worth a thousand punches."

"What kind of talk?" Sakura thought of the remains on her examination table. Now, there was someone who had needed an escort.

"Only rumors, so far." Lee shrugged with one shoulder. "People they know have disappeared. Or have been found."

He stopped beside her car, rocking forward on his cane and waiting as she unlocked the door and slid in.

"As if they do not live in enough fear already." His voice held a bitterness that she had not heard from him since he first lost use of his leg. Lee felt fiercely protective of the children who came to learn at his dojo. A great deal of them were poor children from Konoha-cho who wandered in reluctantly, suspiciously, and needed to learn to defend themselves if they were ever to make it past childhood.

Sakura cut off her thoughts there. She shut her door and rolled down her window. "Call me if you hear anything more specific?"

"Certainly, Sakura." Lee stepped back and bowed once. "Thank you for the spar. Drive safely."

-

When she pulled into the parking lot of her apartment complex, she was vaguely surprised to see the door of one of the apartments open to the breezeway and its lights on, visible through the uncurtained windows.

Her first thought was that there was a domestic dispute in progress. She wracked her brain for who lived in the apartment, for it was just below her own third-floor unit. But she didn't know her neighbors near as well as she should, between letting school and then work take over her life.

So she grabbed the pepper spray from her bag, squared her shoulders, and climbed the stairs at a steady clip, approaching the open doorway. She didn't hear any screaming, but there was a good deal of crashing and muttered curses.

Pepper spray hidden in her hand, she eased into the doorway – just in time to bowl into a sweaty body.

She spun away, swinging out a blow.

Only to have it blocked by someone's arm.

Then the arm lowered, letting light spill onto the man's face.

Sakura's breath left her in a hiss. "Agent _Uzumaki_?"

He flashed her a grin that was as good as a nod. "Dr. Haruno." He straightened, swiping a hand across his forehead, which was as wet with perspiration as the white wife beater shirt he was wearing. "We've gotta stop meeting like this."

"You're telling me." Sakura was annoyed to feel herself flushing slightly. She stuffed the pepper spray into her pocket before he could notice it. "What are you doing here?"

"Being stalked, apparently," said Uzumaki, giving her that schoolboy grin again. In his sweat pants and socks, not to mention the wife beater, he looked especially young. "Did you find something new that you need to tell me in person?"

"No," she said slowly – whether to make sure he understood or because she was too shocked to talk any faster, she didn't know. "I live here."

His eyes widened. "No way! Really?" He crossed his arms, eyes slitting shut as he shook his head. "Uh-uh, I don't believe you."You just don't want to admit you were stalking me."

"It IS true!" Sakura was embarrassingly aware of how immature she sounded, but it wasn't as though she could let the idiot think that she was actually _interested_ in him. "Look, this is my key.301A!" She shook it in his face.

"Ah, I see." He peered at it, then at the key that he pulled from his own pocket, comparing them. "You live right above me."

This observation was followed by a pitiful look in her direction.

It made her immediately aware that she was going to regret revealing that she lived here.

"Eh, Dr. Haruno, I know this is really unprofessional of me, but as a new neighbor, do you think I could ask you for a really small favor?"

Yeah. Definitely regretting it. Sakura sighed. "What is it?"

Uzumaki clapped his hands together entreatingly and bowed at the waist in a posture that would have fit right in at Lee's dojo. "Could I use your microwave to heat up my dinner? I thought I'd be able to use mine, but it's still buried in the back of my car, and I don't think I'll get to unpacking it tonight."

There was a pause.

Then Sakura said gruffly, "Alright. But you better not be an axe murderer in disguise."

Uzumaki grinned. "Even if I was, I don't think I'd try anything on you after all the times you've nearly twisted my arm off today."

She huffed to conceal her smile.

-

The "dinner" to which Uzumaki had referred turned out to be two cups of instant ramen. Sakura eyed them disdainfully as she heated her own kettle of water for some tea. Then she hesitated in front of her refrigerator.

At last, a sigh escaped her. "Look, I've got a bunch of leftover barbecue. Do you wanna help me finish it?"

Uzumaki glanced up from where he was sitting politely at her breakfast bar. For the first time, in the comfortable light of her kitchen instead of the color-bleaching fluorescent lights of the lab or the dimness of the breezeway outside, Sakura realized how very blue the ANBU agent's eyes were above those strange marks on his cheeks.

"Thanks, but no way," he said. "I'm pretty sure you'll punch me if I impose on you anymore, and I wouldn't blame you."

"I wouldn't punch you," said Sakura hotly.

"I said I wouldn't blame you," he said plaintively, as though this should make her feel less insulted.

Sakura's manners were a rather sensitive spot with her. They always had been, first because no one thought a girl from a Konoha-cho orphanage would have any manners and then because no one thought a boorish bitch from the army would have any, either. "I insist that you have some. Think of it as a housewarming gift."

_Although I still can't believe you ended up living in the same apartment complex as me_, she thought in annoyance.

"Uh, okay," said Uzumaki, then flashed her another of those sudden, unexpected grins. "Thanks!"

-

"How do you have so much left over, anyway?" said Uzumaki, looking with wide eyes down at his plate. "You could practically feed a cow with this."

Sakura felt on edge with a man she'd only met that morning, and an ANBU agent at that, sitting at her kitchen table. A vein twitched above her brow.

"Are you calling me a cow?"

"Huh? No! No way!" Uzumaki threw up his hands, laughing. "Why would I say such a thing to my dinner savior?"

"The other day I forgot to eat breakfast and didn't get lunch," she said defensively. "So I ordered a lot. But then one of my colleagues needed me to look at some photos he'd e-mailed me, and…" She definitely did NOT want to remember the photos. "The remains in the photos resembled the chicken a little too much."

"Ah," said Uzumaki. "I see."

And that killed the conversation.

They chewed in silence for a while. It was _almost_ fun to watch him grow more and more uncomfortable as each silent minute ticked by, his spine growing stiffer and stiffer, sweat drops popping out one by one on his forehead.

But mostly it was just awkward.

"So, uh…" Uzumaki pushed a piece of chicken across his plate. "Any news about our tattooed friend?"

"Remember how I said thinking about those remains took away my appetite?"

"Oh! Oops. Sorry." He laughed again. She could practically read his mind from the sweat drop on his head: what ELSE is there to talk about? "Well, you have a really nice place, here."

Sakura sipped from her tea. "Thanks."

She knew he was lying because her apartment was bare, but for the first time, she thought about what it must look like through a stranger's eyes.

She had a mismatched sofa and armchairs that she'd bought from the previous tenant when she'd moved in and began working at the lab after college a year or two ago. An empty space where a dinner table would usually go dominated the room because she'd never bought one. She had the breakfast bar, after all, and it wasn't as though she needed space for anyone but herself to sit and eat, except for, rarely, Tenten when she was on leave, or Lee.

Her walls were bare, as were most of the surfaces in the apartment, a remnant of her time at the orphanage, then the army barracks, then a dormitory room, and then the sterility of the lab where she worked now.

From an outside's point of view, her apartment seemed to be a very cold and lonely place, and Sakura was abruptly discomfited to realize just how much it reflected her actual life.

She pushed away her half-full plate and wrapped her hands around her tea mug. Suddenly she was impatient for Agent Uzumaki to leave.

Perhaps her body language revealed her sentiment, for Uzumaki cleared his throat only a few seconds later.

"I should probably get going," he said, standing up. "Is it cool if I take this with me?" He gestured to his half-empty paper plate.

"Yeah, go ahead." Sakura rose also, relieved.

"Thanks again," he said, picking his way through her living room to the door. "Uh…good night."

"Good night," she said, and forced herself to wait until he was descending the stairs before she closed her door.

-

Sakura's cell phone rang just as she was pulling her lab coat over her clothes the next morning. She flipped it open, cradling it between her ear and shoulder as she buttoned her coat. "Haruno."

"Good morning, Dr. Haruno! It's Naruto Uzumaki."

"What is it?" Sakura said, a shade more impatiently than she knew she should have.

"I found a tattoo parlor that carries our victim's earring. They make them here in the shop. He couldn't narrow the piece down to one person, since he's made a lot of them, but he does have records for a man who got a chess piece tattooed on his shoulder blade."

Sakura stopped buttoning her coat and turned, clambering quickly up the platform steps. "The left one?"

"The left," confirmed Uzumaki's voice. On the other end, she heard typing. "It was a custom job, the guy brought a picture and had it done. A Mr. Shikamaru Nara. Could you print this out for me, sir?"

Sakura was quiet, listening to the hum of a printer and rustle of paper of the other end of the line. She glanced at the clock; it was only just now seven o'clock. "Agent Uzumaki, where did you find a tattoo parlor that was open this early?"

He laughed into the phone. 'This early?" he said. "You mean this late. It's a round-the-clock place. Thank you, sir. Hey, Haruno, I'm going to let you go so I can call in this name and get an address."

"Uh, okay." Slowly, she closed her phone. A frown knit her eyebrows together.

She was slightly puzzled that he had called to tell her he had found the victim's identity at all. The ANBU agents she had worked with before didn't usually share case results with her. Not without her twisting their arm, at least. Usually they just dumped a body on her and expected information. It was one of the reasons Sakura – and most of the other scientists in the lab – held ANBU in such contempt.

She wondered if Uzumaki was a new agent who had not yet been indoctrinated into the ways of ANBU. He seemed very young, after all.

Barely had she nodded good morning to Sai and Shino and put on her first layer of gloves than her cell rang again.

"…crap," she heard Uzumaki saying as she put the phone to her ear, as though to someone else. Then, directly into the mouthpiece, "Hello? Dr. Haruno?"

"Why the crap?" she asked suspiciously.

His sigh made a staticky sound into the speaker. "It's just that the vic's address is in Konoha-cho." She heard the sound of typing on a computer. "I'll call, but if anyone does answer, they probably don't speak Common."

Sakura was quiet for a moment. Her heart had begun to pound, though she knew it was stupid. It would just be questioning, not a gunfight.

Forcing the hope and adrenaline down, she cleared her throat. "I can speak Japanese. Come get me, and I'll translate."

"…"

His obvious reluctance only made her want to do it more. To get out of this lab and do what she had once done, tracking down the bad guys –

"I can't do anything here right now," she told him forcefully. "We're still waiting on the grav-spec analysis, and the grad students can finish measuring the sharp force trauma. I'm not very adept with soft tissue anyway."

"Uh…" Uzumaki seemed taken aback by her insistence. "Okay. If you're sure."

"I'm sure."

"Okay," he said again. "I'll be there in fifteen minutes, then."

The line clicked off, and Sakura held her phone to her ear for a moment, staring at the X-rays in front of her without seeing them. Realization crept into her as slowly as vitreous humor being drawn into a syringe.

He'd said yes. He'd really said yes.

She was going into the field.

-

**A/N:** I haven't revealed much about their pasts yet, but as far as you can tell at this point, do Sakura and Naruto feel in-character?


	3. Chapter 3

**Title:** Scar Tissue

**Author:** 8sword

**Chapter:** 3

**Date:** 2.15.10

**Revised:** 2.22.10

**Summary**: An unsettling new case and an even more unsettling new ANBU agent inject chaos into forensic anthropologist Haruno Sakura's methodical life.

**Author's Notes:** Sorry about Shika, guys. In response to a reviewer's question, Common is the predominant language in this story's setting. Japanese, the language which Sakura speaks, is foreign language still spoken in Konoha-cho. Think of Miami in the United States. English if the official language, but because there is such a large Latin-American population there, people may go their whole lives speaking only Spanish and have no need to learn English. The Japanese language in Konoha-cho works the same way. Hopefully this chapter clears this idea up a bit. Please keep sending me questions if this, or anything else in the story, is confusing.

**Disclaimer: ** Masashi Kishimoto owns Naruto.

-

An hour after their phone conversation, Sakura and Agent Uzumaki were making their way through the crowded streets of Seventh District, or, as it was better known, Konoha-cho.

Konoha-cho was the dirtiest and most crowded district in the city, which was known in its entirety as Konohagakure. Whether Konoha-cho had come first and Konohagakure had grown out around it like a conch shell spiraling out around its center, or whether Konohagakure had existed first and Konoha-cho had burrowed into it like a snail into its shell, no one quite knew anymore.

What _was_ known was that people only lived in Konoha-cho because they didn't have any other choice. Druggies, orphans, prostitutes, refugees, illegal immigrants, or any combination of the preceding–these were the people who filled Konoha-cho's choked, filthy streets.

"We won't make it much farther this way," Uzumaki said, pulling his unmarked SUV into the empty, trash-littered parking lot of a half-collapsed building. "These streets fill up with stalls a block in. We'll have to walk."

Sakura slid out of the passenger door, rolling up the sleeves of the collared white shirt she wore beneath a fitted black vest. She was dressed for the frigid temperatures of the lab, and out here, in the midday August sun, it was sweltering. From experience she knew that once they entered Little Konoha's steam-filled, vendor-crammed streets, the heat and humidity would only worsen.

She wished she had put on an extra coat of deodorant before she left.

"You look like a cop from an old movie," Uzumaki remarked.

Sakura looked over.

The ANBU agent was shucking off his suit jacket and rolling up the sleeves of his white shirt. It was a collared button-down, similar to Sakura's. He also tugged at his tie, which was bright orange but with red swirls dotted across it today, loosening it around his neck.

Sakura saw that a bead of sweat was already rolling past his Adam's apple.

He tossed his jacket into the back seat. "All you're missing is the gun and the shoulder holster."

"Speaking of which, yours is showing." Sakura slanted a pointed look at the rather obvious firearm riding on his belt. "You expect them to talk to you with that practically staring them in the face?"

She had wondered on the ride over if she should make an effort to make nicer to Uzumaki, since he was letting her tag along in the field as no ANBU agent had ever done before.

But several attempts at polite conversation on the long ride here had resulted only in several dead-ends and awkward silences, so she had given up and decided to give her tongue free rein.

Uzumaki didn't seem to mind, though. He was giving her another of those wide grins. "How about you worry about the translating and let me worry about the firepower, Dr. Haruno?"

Sakura's jaw clenched. He thought that she was a useless lab squint!

Sakura nearly bit out that she could probably snatch his gun out of its holster and have a bullet beveling through his frontal bone before he could even blink.

But his cell phone rang before she could open her mouth.

Still grinning, Uzumaki raised his eyebrows at her as he reached into his pocket.

Sakura turned away, her jaw clenched determinedly shut. There was no point lashing out at this rookie who was so ignorant of ANBU protocol that he took a lab specialist into the field with him. He probably wouldn't even last this case before being kicked out of ANBU.

"Ah," Uzumaki said into the phone. His blond brows lifted higher. "Yup. Just a sec."

Then, to Sakura's surprise, he handed her the slim cell phone.

She took it. It was warm and slightly slick with perspiration from his hand. She felt a bead of sweat trickle down the side of her own face. "Hello?"

"It's Sai."

"Ah." Sakura relaxed slightly. "News?"

"Shizune's grad student just finished weighing the organs."

Sakura frowned. "Why? I did that last night."

There was a pause. "You did?"

Sakura's frown deepened. "Yes. Why else do you think I stayed until ten o'clock? To admire the exquisite fly colonization in his auditory meatus?"

Another pause. On the other end of the line, she heard footsteps on metal as Sai walked to the end of the table, where the autopsy forms were usually put upon completion. "Dr. Haruno, the forms aren't here."

"Oh, hang on." Sakura remembered now. "I put them in a folder in my office. I wanted them somewhere safe overnight."

"Well." Sai's voice was dry. "No need to worry about that anymore. Dr. Sarutobi already had Shizune's grad assistant weigh them." He clicked his tongue. "He must have been some alcoholic, our chess player. His liver was – "

"His liver?"

Sai went immediately silent at the sharpness of Sakura's voice.

"He didn't have a liver, Sai."

Sai was silent for a moment longer. "Are we talking about the same body, Dr. Haruno? I am referring to Shikamaru Nara, case number eight two–"

"We're talking about the same body," Sakura snapped. "Nara's remains did not have a liver. That's why I put the forms in my office to keep them secure."

Sai's voice held a note of surprise, and that was something she did not heart often. "But Rin found a liver, she–"

"–is either lying or an idiot," said Sakura. "Notify Dr. Sarutobi and tell him I'll be at the lab by lunchtime."

Sai clicked his tongue again. "Alright. Wait, where_ are_ you, anyway?"

"Female thing." Sakura flipped the phone shut before he could challenge her lie.

Uzumaki watched Sakura as she handed his phone back to him. "What's up?"

"Something bad," said Sakura darkly. "A liver that wasn't in Nara's body last night magically showed up there this morning."

"Is that normal?"

Sakura shot him an _are you an idiot?_ look. "What do _you _think?"

"I don't mean the magically reappearing organ," he said, grimacing. "I meant his liver not being there before. Do organs usually…fall out if someone gets their belly cut open?"

"Soft tissue's not my specialty," said Sakura. "But if whatever caused the sharp force trauma on the abdomen cut through one of the mesenteries there, it's possible that some of the organs could have fallen out post- or peri-mortem."

The problem was that the liver was located in the dorsal section of the abdomen, nestled behind the intestines and several other organs. In the scenario she had just explained to Uzumaki, those organs would have fallen out as well. But they – or at least remnants of them, left from the quick work of decomp and insect larvae – had been present in Nara's remains.

"Perimortem," repeated Uzumaki, leaning against the SUV's hood, then wincing and flinching away as the hot metal burned his bare forearm. "That means while he was being killed, right?"

"Right." Sakura uncrossed her arms and looked around pointedly. She didn't like thinking about these things, people's organs spilling out of them while they were still alive. It was part of the reason she had chosen to focus on bone instead of flesh. "So, are we going or not?"

-

With an ease that was almost suspicious, Uzumaki found the way to the victim's address. It was a tenement building, one of dozens lining the thin street, which was more of a dirt path than a street. Sakura doubted that even her small car would fit down the narrow way, even if it could dodge the choke of people walking and bicycling.

At least there weren't as many food vendor stalls in this residential street, so it didn't smell like fish guts cooking in the sun. It was, instead, filled with the thick smell of sweaty, unwashed people, many of whom gave Sakura and Uzumaki suspicious, resentful, or frightened looks as they walked around them.

Sakura was glad for the small bubble of space that the Konoha-cho inhabitants gave them, even if it did make them stand out like a store thumb. She wondered how much of the people's avoidance had to do with the gun visible at Uzumaki's belt and how much of it had to do with their hair color. She could remember countless occasions of being shunned because of superstitions that her pink hair meant she must be a demon.

They weren't pleasant memories, but they distracted her from thoughts of what was going on back at the lab. This organ fiasco was bad enough, but if Sarutobi realized that she wasn't at the lab because she was with Uzumaki…

She shook away the voice in her head that told her she should have gone back and forced herself to focus on the situation at hand.

The tenement building had no gated parking lot requiring a code to open the gate, the way there was at her own apartment complex – there was no parking lot for this building at all, in fact. And there was no lobby or even a lock at the main door to keep people out until someone inside buzzed them in.

Instead, she and Uzumaki were able to walk straight inside.

The interior, just a square of space with two apartment doors and a flight of stairs leading up from one corner, was dim and smelled stale, like baked beans and something sour.

Sakura's nose wrinkled. She glanced at Uzumaki, seeing in the faint light from the grimy window that he had also scrunched up his nose.

"I've been in guys' locker rooms that smelled better than this," he remarked to her in a low voice as he headed up the stairs. They were carpeted with old, worn material that crunched when she put her weight on them.

Sakura didn't disagree. The building, so far, was worse than where she had grown up, and that was saying something.

But it didn't smell any worse than some of the buildings she had been in while she was in Sand Country, crouched with her fellow unshowered soldiers, some of whose wounds were necrosing because they'd run out of medical supplies and couldn't leave the shelter without getting blown up.

Maybe it was remembering those days, but she had to resist the urge to flatten herself against the wall as she and Uzumaki climbed the creaking stairs. She felt too undefended. Her arms itched for the comforting weight of a firearm.

"Easy," came Uzumaki's voice. She looked up and saw him glancing down at her from where he stood a few steps above her. "You sure you're up for this?"

Sakura bristled, annoyed that he'd noticed her weakness. It wasn't that she was scared. It was just that she really missed being in his position, as the person with the gun.

"Of course," she said shortly, though she kept her voice low. "There probably won't even be anybody there, and we'll just end up questioning neighbors."

He studied her for one more minute with those annoying blue eyes.

Then he turned around, climbing to the stop of the stairs, and stopped in front of a door with peeling brown paint and a darker 208 vaguely outlined on it where metal numbers had probably once hung.

Sakura stopped just behind him. She heard, to her surprise, several voices coming from inside the apartment.

Uzumaki flicked her a glance. She returned it, brows aloft, her irritation with him momentarily displaced by this mutual curiosity.

Uzumaki knocked one, two, three short raps.

Immediately, the voices cut off.

The floor creaked. Sakura glanced down at the flimsy wooden planks beneath her feet, then back up as the creaking stopped directly in front of the door. There was a pause during which Sakura imagined whoever was on the door's other side peered through the peephole.

Then the door creaked slowly open.

Two red-veined green eyes in a pallid, almost albino female face glared out at them. Her zygomatic arches jutted from the rest of her face in a distinctly unhealthy way.

"_Hai_?" she bit out.

"I'm Agent Uzumaki from ANBU, and this is Dr. Haruno," said Uzumaki. Sakura began to translate as he spoke, the rapid Japanese consonants clumsy on her tongue at first. It had been a long time since she had spoken her native tongue aloud. "We have some questions. May we come in?"

The girl's eyes flicked between the two of them, then darted back to Sakura's face. "_Naze_?" Her tone was aggressive, but her voice trembled.

"She wants to know why we're here," Sakura told Uzumaki.

He was watching the girl's face. "Tell her we're here to ask about Shikamaru Nara."

Sakura didn't need to translate this, though. Although the girl's brows were furrowed and uncomprehending for the first part of Uzumaki's sentence, her eyes went wide when he said Nara's name.

Then they floated shut, her lips compressing until the already white skin around them turned so pale it was almost green.

"Fine," she snapped in Japanese. Her voice was still venomous, but the weariness and resignation in it diluted the venom. "Come in."

Sakura began to translate, but cut off as the girl opened the door all the way.

Her body, behind it, was as thin as her face, except for the swell around her middle.

"You should not be this thin when you're that far along," burst from Sakura's mouth in angry Japanese.

The girl, her arms crossed so that she seemed almost to be hugging her distended abdomen, glared at her.

"What did you say her name was?" she spat at Uzumaki in Japanese. "Dr. _Obvious_?"

Sakura felt herself flush, but from anger, not embarrassment.

"Are you using drugs?" she demanded, taking in the girl's emaciated frame and reddened eyes again. "Do you even know what that could do to the baby–?"

"Dr. Haruno." Uzumaki's hand grasped her shoulder.

Sakura shrugged him off, clamping down on her tongue and her temper. She forced herself to meet his blue gaze.

"Please ask if she knows Nara," he said quietly.

Sakura inhaled through her teeth and turned back to the glaring girl. "Do you know Nara Shikamara?"

"I'm his girlfriend," snapped the girl. "Did that idiot go and get himself caught?" Her hands clenched. "I _told_ him to stop!"

Then she whipped her head back up to glare anew at Sakura. "Are you going to put me in jail, too? What do you think THAT will do to the baby?"

Sakura translated this for Uzumaki as the girl stared hotly at her. She left out the part about how the baby would do in jail.

"Ask her what she means about him getting caught. Caught for what?"

The girl gave them a nasty look when Sakura translated this.

"If you don't know, I'm not going to tell you," she spat.

"Please tell her that we believe we've found his body," said Uzumaki before Sakura could even translate this. Apparently the girl's poisonous glare was enough to tell him the gist of what she had said. "Gently, please, Dr. Haruno. Remember that he was her baby's father."

Sakura harumphed at this, but she translated his sentence word for word, trying to inject some sympathy into her voice, if not for the woman, then at least for the baby's sake.

The crumpling of the girl's features pushed a sour taste into Sakura's mouth. She looked away as the girl swayed and sank to her knees.

Uzumaki darted forward, placing a hand under her elbow.

"_Iie_," the girl breathed. Her eyes, pooling with tears that began to stream fast down her razor-thin cheeks, gazed blindly into the dirty carpet. "_Iie…_"

Sakura crouched beside her, hand reaching for the girl's wrist.

"Ridiculous," she muttered in Common when she felt the stuttering pulse against her fingertips. She reached into her bag and pulled out a granola bar, switching back to Japanese. "Eat this."

The girl didn't move.

"_Eat _it," Sakura repeated forcefully.

"Calm down, Dr. Haruno," muttered Uzumaki. "She just found out her boyfriend's dead."

"And she's going to lose her baby, too, if she doesn't eat." Sakura shoved the bar in the girl's face again. "Either you eat this yourself or I make you eat it."

With shaking fingers, the pale girl took the bar and took a bite. Tears still streamed down her face, funneling into her mouth.

"I thought he'd left," she gasped around the granola bar. "I thought he'd just decided the baby would be too much work and left…oh, God. Shikamaru. Shikamaru…"

The granola bar crumpled in her fist as she pressed her hands to her eyes.

"What's your name, ma'am?" asked Uzumaki quietly. Sakura translated, her hands fisted on her thighs.

"Yamanaka Ino," choked the girl. "He… Are you sure? Are you sure it's him?"

Uzumaki opened his mouth, then looked at Sakura.

"He had a tattoo?" she asked the girl. "A chess piece, on his shoulder?_ Shougi_?"

"_Shougi_," said the girl, recognizing the word. "He loved it. No one could beat him at shougi. He had a queen piece tattooed on him, on his shoulder… He got mad that he'd gotten it done, when he found out about the baby. He said he should have saved the money so we could have used it on something useful…" She began to cry in earnest again. "I should have known. He was working so hard to save for the baby, I should have known he wouldn't run…"

Sakura translated all this quickly for Uzumaki.

He already had a thoughtful expression on his face, as he crouched like a frog with his hands planted on the carpet in front of his shoes.

"Ask her if he was a drug dealer."

Sakura frowned at him. Drug dealers, in her experience, were invariably also drug _users_. And although she was less than convinced that this Yamanaka girl was clean, Nara's body had shown none of the usual signs of drug use. There had been no deformation of his nasal septum, as occurred with intranasal drugs, or erosion of the enamel on his front teeth, as was characteristic of cocaine users. What little flesh had been left on him to examine had shown no injections sites from needles, either.

"Dr. Haruno," Uzumaki said, like he was reminding a child.

Her frown deepened as she looked at him. She turned to Yamanaka and asked Uzumaki's question, waiting expectantly for a negative.

Instead, the girl put her arms tightly around her distended abdomen. She bent her head, as if she could press her face to the baby growing inside her. Then she lifted her head and looked at Uzumaki. Her voice, when she spoke, was as tired as her face.

"_Hai_."

-

With Yamanaka's identification of the clothing and the tattoo, the remains were positively identified as Nara Shikamaru, age 24, occupation: drug dealer. With the identification taken care of, Sakura's next job was to give ANBU the cause and manner of death and a murder weapon so that the victim's murderer could be found.

But first there was the matter of the mysterious liver.

"I am not a pathologist." Sakura straightened from the shriveled, nodule-covered organ on the table and stripped the latex gloves from her hands. "But even I don't even need to do more than look at that liver to tell it doesn't belong to these remains."

She dropped the gloves in the biohazard waste can and met the wide, frightened eyes of the brown-haired woman standing next to Dr. Sarutobi. Rin was panicking, and rightly so. If Shizune got back and saw that her grad assistant hadn't realized that a liver fairly _covered_ with alcoholic nodes didn't belong with a body whose other organs showed no sign of alcohol damage–much less that she hadn't noticed the neat cut across the liver's hepatic artery and vein–Rin would be out on her ass before she could summon the tears to roll down those purple facial tattoos of hers.

"Do you know the credibility we would have lost if this had gone to court as evidence?" Sakura demanded. "If ANBU thought we couldn't even notice when an organ–"

"Dr. Haruno." Sarutobi's voice was firm. "That is enough. I will take care of making sure Rin knows what was done wrong."

Sakura inhaled sharply. How many times in a day was she going to be chastised? Why, when other people were the ones making the mistakes, were they dealt with so leniently?

"Yes, sir," she said through gritted teeth. She strode out of his office and back to her lab platform.

Sai was there, waiting in his usual silent way as he measured the long bones of a skeleton on the table furthest away from Nara's remains. The file folder that was clipped to the end of the platform was brown, meaning that the remains he was measuring belonged to one of the thousands of unidentified soldiers who had died in the war against Sand and been sent home after the armistice to be identified so that they could be returned to their families.

If they had any.

"So?" he said expectantly as she swiped her badge and climbed the steps. "Which was it? Lying or an idiot?"

"Idiot," Sakura replied, still through clenched teeth. "The hepatic artery and vein were sliced cleanly across. Someone cut that liver out of another body and put it there, probably because they knew that girl was too stupid to notice."

"Now, now, Dr. Haruno," said Sai. "You don't want to behave an unpleasantly as you smell, do you?"

Sakura wheeled around, scowling. "What?"

Sai blinked at her. "You smell almost as delightful as Mr. Nara over there."

Remembering Konoha-cho's sweltering streets and how sweaty she'd been, Sakura scowled. I don't smell _that_ bad."

A small corner of her mind felt mortified by the idea that she might have smelled as sweaty as she was while she was in the car with Agent Uzumaki. But then she comforted herself with the reminder that she had seen Uzumaki _coated_ in sweat at his apartment and not smelling like a branch of cherry blossoms himself.

However, this thought did little to calm her down. Instead, she felt her pulse beginning to quicken.

Annoyed, she swallowed and looked almost directly into the light over Nara's remains before her pupils could dilate too noticeably. Sai was a fiend when it came to noticing people's pupillary changes, and she would sooner eat a roach sandwich than let him notice her reaction and somehow connect it to Uzumaki.

"Did you get the forms from my desk?" she asked, buttoning her lab coat over her clothes.

He nodded the affirmative. "I put the key back in its hiding place. And I started a separate case file for the liver. Shino took it to see if he can find any particulates to track where it might have come from."

Sakura nodded. "Thanks, Sai."

"Dr. Haruno."

Sakura turned. Shino was coming up the stairs.

"Shino," she greeted. "Are we ready?"

He nodded.

Sai watched them with some interest. "You're defleshing the body already?"

"I'm sick of depending on this soft tissue crap," said Sakura, drawing a snort from Sai. "It's clear we can't depend on Shizune's grad assistant for it, and I'm not gonna find anything more than I've already found. By the time Shizune gets back in a week, the decomp will have gone too far for even her to find anything, and our murderer could be all the way to Wave Country."

She pulled on another pair of gloves. "Better for us to deflesh it now and maybe I'll find something on the bone to tell us about the murder weapon before Shizune gets back."

Shino wheeled a coffin-sized, cylindrical, plastic alloy container onto the platform. Together, he and Sakura lifted the table that Nara's remains were on. They slid the entire stainless steel tabletop into the coffin, where it latched securely. Shino closed the clear lid of the container over the remains, latching it shut.

Then he went to the other end of the container, where a circular aperture about the size of a soda can protruded. Shino popped its lid open and secured it to a similar device located on the side of the ant farm that he had brought with him. He then lifted two flaps, one on the container aperture and one on the ant farm aperture, like guillotine blades being lifted.

As quickly as if they sensed what Shino wanted them to do, the ants within the farm began to troop from the farm into the container's aperture, and then, rapidly, onto the remains in the container.

Sai put down his clipboard and came to watch as the army ants, which Shino had discovered during one of his trips to Earth Country, began their work on the remains. They could strip a buffalo bare of flesh in under half an hour. Nara's body would probably take less than twenty minutes.

Sakura turned away, going to the other end of the platform until all that was left of the remains were bones. She could see stuff like this without vomiting, but that didn't mean she wanted to.

-

Now that she had been inside it, it was easy to recognize Uzumaki's SUV as she pulled into the apartment parking lot. It was parked a little crookedly in its space, as though its driver had been half-asleep as he pulled in. Or as though he was just a bad driver, she thought snidely.

Dealing with the snappy Yamanaka and the incompetent grad assistant, plus doing a cursory examination of all two hundred and six of Nara's defleshed bones had left Sakura sore and crabby.

Groaning under her breath and kneading at her back as she climbed the stairs, she realized that she would probably be the one eating instant ramen for dinner tonight. She was too damn tired to make anything else.

Sakura mounted the last step and turned.

Not until she was several steps down the breezeway did she register the dark shape huddled beside her apartment door.

She juddered to a stop. Momentum carried her another step forward, and then recognition a step more. Even as slowly as her exhausted mind was working, it was impossible not to immediately recognize that hair.

"Uzumaki?" she heard herself say.

He didn't move. For a single, rib-tightening instant, Sakura thought he was dead. Murdered and dumped at her doorstep for her to do an autopsy on.

But her legs had carried her mechanically closer. She found herself in a crouch beside him.

At this proximity, it was easy to see the slight shiver of his unbuttoned white shirt as he exhaled against it, and the bit of saliva that was pooling in his slack mouth and dripping slowly onto his bright tie.

Barely missing, in fact, the plastic bag of white take-out boxes balanced between his updrawn knees.

Sakura leaned back before clearing her throat. If Uzumaki had had half the training she had, she didn't want to be within arm's reach of him when he woke up in what he would probably identify as an unknown, and thus potentially hostile, environment.

Although, she thought, if he'd had the training she had, he wouldn't have fallen asleep in said environment in the first place.

"Uzumaki," she said. "Agent Uzumaki, wake up."

His body went tense and breath hitched. His eyes snapped open, darting to her, blue even in the meager light from the street lamp three stories down.

Then he grinned at her, the scar tissue on the sides of his face pulling at his eyelids. He sucked the drool back into his mouth. "Haruno! You're back!"

Despite his enthusiastic awakening, he didn't seem about to rise from his sitting position, with his arms dangling over his updrawn knees, any time soon. Sakura rocked into a more comfortable crouch, balancing her elbows on her knees.

"Did my cell phone not work?" she asked tiredly. "I had it on, but sometimes the grav-spectrometer interferes with the signal."

"Signal?" he said, his eyes flicking to her waist, where her cell phone was hooked to her belt. "Oh. No, I didn't call. You only gave me your number for professional purposes, so I didn't think you'd approve if I used it to call you for something personal."

Sakura's pulse skipped.

Uzumaki pushed a hand behind his neck and laughed. "I wanted to pay you back for last night, see, so I got dinner, but you weren't here. So I figured I'd wait and see if you came back, but…" He laughed sheepishly again. "I guess I fell asleep."

Sakura remembered how crookedly his SUV had been parked and wondered suddenly how late he had been up the night before. She remembered suddenly how he had been rubbing his eyes that morning and how he had found Nara's tattoo at a twenty-four hour tattoo parlor. He'd unpacked his things and had dinner with her, but she realized belatedly that she would not be surprised if he had gone out right after that and begun searching tattoo parlors to match their designs to Nara's.

"Okay." Sakura unlatched her arms from around her knees and stood up. "I'll accept your return favor. But I'm pretty sure you're just using me for my silverware."

She glanced at him from the corner of her eye just in time to see a grin flash across his face.

"You're right," he admitted. "I haven't unpacked mine yet. But I got a little more moving-in done. For example, I have a floor now." Uzumaki paused, then gestured vaguely toward the stairs. "You wanna see?"

It was an awkward moment, as uncomfortable as their silence at Sakura's breakfast bar the night before. But that had been mundane, at least, just the usual awkwardness of having nothing in common to talk about with someone.

This awkwardness was not mundane. It was thick and warm like the steam that billowed out when she pushed open the shower curtain. It was filled with the faint scent of Uzumaki's cologne and the heat radiating from beneath his loosened collar and the expectant weight of his blue eyes.

And suddenly, like the goose bumps that rushed up along her skin when she stepped out of the warm shower into the cold air, Sakura realized that her body was _really_ attracted to Uzumaki.

"Um, not tonight," she heard herself say. Then laugh, too loudly. "Really, I'm too tired to even _look_ at another set of stairs tonight–"

Then she was letting herself inside her apartment, gripping her keys and going immediately to the kitchen, where she could be business-like in taking out plates and silverware instead of having to look at him.

"Did you find anything new?" he asked as she set paper plates down. "From the body, I mean."

She was regaining her balance, gradually. It was just her body, after all. That didn't mean anything, not really. "Not yet. We're still waiting on test results. Will we need spoons?"

"Ah–no," he said.

As she turned around with forks and knives, he was pulling the take-out boxes from the plastic bag.

She stopped short. "Dumplings?"  
"Yeah." He looked up. "They're your favorite, right?"

Sakura glared a little, feeling herself return to normal as defensiveness filled her. He had looked up her file?

Almost as if he'd read her mind, he grinned a little and pointed at the dango restaurant menus clipped to her fridge. "Wild guess."

Sakura's glare lightened. She laughed a little, at herself, pushing a hand through her bangs. "Sorry. I was a little scared there."

"I could tell," he said dryly. "I get that from people a lot. Although I don't think an ANBU file on you would have your favorite food in it."

"Why not?" She took a stick of dango. The mere sight of it was melting away some of the soreness from her shoulder muscles. "Couldn't you use it as a…bait or something, if I committed a crime and you needed to trap me?"

She felt like she was babbling. Maybe low blood sugar was getting to her. She crammed the dumpling in her mouth to shut herself up.

"Nah. They're like MO's." Uzumaki took a stick, too. He didn't seem to have noticed anything amiss. "They change, evolve. You probably didn't always like dumplings, right?"

Sakura swallowed. "Since I was five." She felt smug to be proving him wrong.

Uzumaki's eyebrows rose. "Really? Me, too! I've been a faithful ramen lover for as long as I can remember." He sighed happily.

"You can't be serious. That stuff's like oversalted cardboard."

"Delicately flavored cardboard," he corrected cheerfully. "And that's only the instant kind. When you actually make it yourself, it beats this dango of yours, hands-down."

He popped another dumpling in his mouth and took advantage of her dropped jaw to say, "I could make it sometime for you to try. I'm pretty good at it."

Sakura lowered the dumpling she had been about to pop in her mouth. Was he attempting to flirt with her? Or was he just genuinely this friendly, trying to be on good terms with a neighbor and co-worker?

Before she could say anything, Uzumaki leaned back in his chair, pushing it onto two legs and knotting his hands behind his head. "Ehh, but if we don't get a break in this case soon, it'll be a while before I get enough pots and pans unpacked to make ramen."

His mournful sigh was enough to make her realize he'd probably meant the offer much more casually than she had taken it.

A flush of embarrassment heated the back of her neck. Determined to be just as nonchalant as him, she said with a careless lift of her brow, "Is that a hint you might keep showing up here?"

The look Uzumaki shot her was guarded, then surprised. His lips quirked upward. "So Sakura Haruno does know how to make a joke!"

Sakura's lifted brow lowered in indignation, although she was a little distracted by the way he'd said her name. "I joke."

Uzumaki flashed her a grin, all white teeth and crinkled eyes. "Geeze, you don't know how relieved I am. I was scared I'd gotten stuck with a total stick in the mud."

This comment reminded her of Tenten. Her friend always called her a stick in the mud for refusing to get drunk or let guys buy her drinks the few times they'd gone clubbing.

Sakura gave Uzumaki the same retort she'd always given Tenten: "Watch it, or you'll have a stick in something, and it won't be mud–"

She had forgotten, though, that it wouldn't mean the same thing when she said it to a guy. She broke off, snapping her mouth shut.

Uzumaki was laughing so hard he was spraying dumpling crumbs across her tablecloth. Sakura pressed her lips together, flushing, and began stiffly to sweep them off the table with a napkin.

"Sorry, sorry," gasped Uzumaki. His eyes glittered wetly as he tried to catch his breath. "I'm not a pervert, I swear."

"Sure," she said, still stiffly. Then, just to make sure he knew– "I didn't mean it that way."

He quirked one of his blond eyebrows, still grinning. "Yeah, I kind of picked that up for myself, Dr. Obvious."

Sakura smiled despite herself–then frowned.

Dr. Obvious?

"Hang on," she said. "That's what Yamanaka called me."

There was a pause.

"Really?" Uzumaki said too innocently, scratching his cheek.

"_And _you say my name strangely."

"Strangely?" He looked at her with those boyish blue eyes. "Not strangely."

"Like you know what it means," Sakura realized. Her voice was accusing. "You speak Japanese, don't you?"

"I don't…_speak_ it, exactly," he drew out, wincing as he watched her eyes for her reaction. "I _understand_ it. But I don't speak it. Not very well."

"But you understood everything I said today." Sakura's voice was flat.

He winced again. "Yes?"

So then he _really _knew what a bitch she'd been to the teenager, Yamanaka. Sakura sighed, beginning to chew on her lip, then pushing it out to stop herself.

"God. How'd you even learn it?" she demanded. "I thought you just moved here."

"Moved back, more like," Uzumaki muttered. He wasn't sheepish or wincing anymore, just staring at the empty odango sticks on his paper plate. "I grew up in Konoha-cho. Then I moved away."

He rubbed his eyelids with the heel of his palm. "You know, I'm really tired. I should have gotten more shut-eye last night." He smiled at her, standing up. "I guess I'll go catch some now. Thanks for the plates and stuff."

"No, thanks for dinner." Sakura's response was automatic – and unheard. Uzumaki was already pushing out her front door, faster than she would have expected, closing it so quietly behind him that she barely heard the click.

-

**A/N:** How was the characterization in _this _chapter? Too much?


	4. Chapter 4

**Title:** Scar Tissue

**Author:** 8sword

**Chapter:** 4

**Date:** 2.21.10

**Summary**: An unsettling new case and an even more unsettling new ANBU agent inject chaos into forensic anthropologist Haruno Sakura's methodical life.

**Author's Notes:** Thanks for the reviews! Sorry about my stressing over the characterization. Since this is my first real Naruto fic, I want to make sure I don't want to wander into the Forest of Death that is OOC-ness.

Please note that I have finally posted a bio along with a link to my fic website.

If my Google searches serve correctly, _ome-e, onna no ko_, and _gaki_ mean "you" (rudely), "girl," and "brat," respectively. _Onegai_ means "please."

**Disclaimer: **Masashi Kishimoto owns Naruto.

* * *

"Whoah! Check it out! Uzumaki's in his office!" Kankurou caught himself on the doorjamb of Naruto's office that morning. "That's something you don't see every day."

"You would if you ever stayed past five," Naruto retorted, glancing up from his computer screen and flicking the other agent a quick grin meant to move him on his way.

Kankurou didn't take the hint. He stepped inside Naruto's closet of an office, his hands on his hips, and looked around. "Love what you've done with the place."

Naruto rolled his eyes, not looking away from the JPEGs Dr. Haruno's team had e-mailed him. He knew that his office was as bare as–well, as bare as Dr. Haruno's apartment.

"I haven't had time to move in yet. I've been busy."

"Yeah." Kankurou snorted and plopped into the chair in front of Naruto's desk. He leaned back, propping his feet on the cluttered desktop. "Heard you got saddled with Haruno."

_This_ made Naruto look up. Kankurou had said, 'Haruno,' not 'Dr. Haruno.' As though he was familiar with her.

Or as though he was being derogatory, Naruto realized, taking in the other agent's twisted lip.

He straightened, his hand falling from the computer mouse. "You've worked with her?"

Kankurou leaned forward to take a book from Naruto's desk and flip through it. "Couple times. She kicks ass at what she does, but it's hell working with her. She always wants more."

For a stab of a second, Naruto thought that Kankurou meant "more" as in a relationship. His eyebrows flew up. "W-what?"

Kankurou, like any respectable red-blooded ANBU agent, didn't need the unspoken innuendo pointed out to him. He snickered.

"Nah, if it was like that, I wouldn't _mind_ giving her more." He waggled his brows at Naruto. "But I mean the way she keeps jumping down your throat to find out what's going on with the case. The other agents who've worked with her had the same problem. She wants to know the suspects, what the people who knew the vics said, what we're doing–God, she's like a mad chihuahua, always yipping at you–"

He broke off, looking at Naruto's confused expression with a creased brow. "What, she hasn't done that to you?"

Naruto was frowning. Dr. Haruno _hadn't_ done any of those things to him, which was making him wonder what he lacked that other agents had if she was treating him so differently.

Then he realized that really, he hadn't given Haruno a chance to do what Kankurou had just described. He'd kept her updated on almost every aspect of the case–called her with Nara's identity, taken her with him to check out his apartment and talk to his girlfriend–as soon as he discovered them.

"Nope," he told Kankurou, sitting back down to look at his computer screen again. "She doesn't need to. I keep her in the loop."

The other agent's eyes were slightly wide. "In the _loop_? Uzumaki, haven't you ever read the ANBU protocol manual?"

Naruto shrugged and grinned, trying to lighten the atmosphere. "Real men don't read directions."

"Shit," said Kankurou. "There's a line, man. Us here–" He drew a line in front of him with his finger, and then plucked a foot on one side, "–and civilians there." He pointed out the window.

Naruto thought that, from the way Kankurou was calling Haruno a civilian so dismissively, he probably hadn't seen–or been on the receiving end of–Haruno's Dragon Arm Twist, the way that Naruto had.

The realization made him feel strangely privileged.

But there was still the fact that if Director Danzou found out how much he had involved Dr. Haruno in the field investigation, he was going to get majorly chewed out–distinguished family background or not.

-

The more Sakura thought about it–and she did think about it, a lot, much more than Uzumaki deserved, she thought uncharitably–the angrier she got that he had just walked away after revealing that he was from Konoha-cho.

He had lied to her. And then just left, as though he didn't owe her an explanation!

Not that she cared, thought Sakura frigidly. Uzumaki wasn't the only one with a sob story. They all had them. His probably wasn't that tragic. After all, he had said that he had "moved away" from Konoha-cho. If his Japanese was so bad that he could barely speak it, then he probably hadn't lived in the district long enough to feel its full effects.

After all, he was an ANBU agent now, and cho-hos didn't become ANBU agents.

They became the people that made ANBU agents necessary. The killed and the killers.

Pulling into the lab's parking lot, the first thing that Sakura saw was Uzumaki's SUV. She ground her teeth, and ground them harder when, as she strode up to the lab platform, buttoning up her lab coat, the first thing she saw was Uzumaki's face.

He was clambering down the platform steps, talking over his shoulder to an ANBU crime scene tech behind him.

"_Excuse_ me," said Sakura sharply. He halted on the bottom step, eyes swinging to hers. "Did you just compromise my examination table?"

A hand touched Sakura's tense shoulder. "Dr. Haruno."

She turned to see Dr. Sarutobi stepping up beside her.

"Your examination table was compromised as soon as that foreign liver appeared in Nara's remains," he said, not releasing her shoulder. "Agent Uzumaki and his techs are investigating how it got there."

Sakura's eyes returned to the ANBU tech with his handful of evidence bags, watching Uzumaki point him toward the exit. "Remind me what we pay our security guards to do?"

"This case is an ANBU murder investigation, Dr. Haruno. Protocol required that we notify ANBU." Sarutobi rubbed his bristly chin. "And Agent Uzumaki was adamant that he be allowed to conduct the investigation."

Sakura met Uzumaki's eyes. He didn't even have the decency to look ashamed of himself for yesterday. "I bet."

She could feel the weight of Sarutobi's eyes on her for a moment longer, as though warning her to keep her claws in–the lab director was quite familiar with her animosity toward ANBU agents–before he cleared his throat.

"Well, Agent Uzumaki? Have you found anything so far?"

Uzumaki looked away from Sakura to Dr. Sarutobi. "Nothing seems like it was messed with. My people took prints, so we'd like to match them to the prints of anyone who has access to this platform to see if anyone was up here who wasn't supposed to. You have them on file?"

"Of course," said Dr. Sarutobi. "Please come with me."

He led Uzumaki across the glossy lab floor toward his office. Sakura watched them go, her face hard, before turning and swiping her card to make her way up the platform.

"Do you think they'll find anything?" asked Sai, who was sitting at his computer, apparently having watched the whole tableau.

"They better." Sakura snapped on two pairs of gloves. "If someone can just walk up here and plant a liver in a body without us being able to do anything about it, our lab evidence will be as useless in court cases as a bathing suit in Sand Country."

Sai smiled. "What an aesthetically pleasing comparison." He watched Sakura position the extendable arm of the autopsy table magnifying lens over the bones that Shino's ants had defleshed the day before. "Speaking of bathing suits, have you heard whether Dr. Sarutobi is going to fire Rin?"

Sakura glanced up from the lens, eyebrow raised. "I fail to see the relation between bathing suits and Rin."

"It would be pleasant to observe her in a bathing suit," said Sai. "She is visually appealing."

"So you do swing that way." Sakura returned her attention to the lens. "Shino and I were wondering."

"I will refrain from asking why Shino was interested in my sexuality." Sai connected the lens to his computer, bringing the magnified image of Nara's iliac crest onto his computer screen. "Suffice it to say that regardless of Rin's inadequacy in other areas..."

Sakura snorted at this.

"–she is very… I believe the term is, easy on the eyes." Sai's eyes unfocused for a moment, then blinked. "Unfortunately, it seems that she already has a boyfriend."

"I fail to see the misfortune of the situation," said Shino's quiet voice as he came up onto the platform. "The absence of a boyfriend would make not improve your chances with her."

Sai narrowed his eyes at the entomologist.

Sakura paid no attention to either of them. Her eyes were fixed on the computer screen without seeing it, her thoughts on the mystery liver.

Whoever had put the liver with Nara's remains must have been counting on Rin being the one to weigh the organs. Only someone of Rin's low skill level would fail to notice the liver didn't belong with the rest of the body. The only people who would know that Rin would be given the assignment of weighing organs were people who worked in the lab.

The culprit, then, was one of the people working with them. She glanced around briefly, taking in Sai's bent, glossy head, Shino's spiky hair, the heads of the people working at the other autopsy platforms.

But the _who_ concerned her less than _why_. Why would someone interfere with an ANBU murder investigation? What was in the missing liver that they hadn't wanted its absence to be noticed?

"Dr. Haruno?"

Sakura forced her eyes back into focus, turning.

Dr. Sarutobi stood at the foot of the platform steps. "Agent Uzumaki is requesting your assistance."

Sakura looked past him, frowning toward his office, then back at Nara's remains. "I'm in the middle of examining the remains, Dr. Sarutobi."

Sarutobi looked at her. He did not speak. Then he crooked his finger at her, gesturing her to come down.

Sakura compressed her lips and stepped down off the platform, coming to standing in front of him.

He smiled at her tightly. "I have been very patient with you, Dr. Haruno. You know that I understand how irritating working with ANBU agents can be." His voice was low. "However, Agent Uzumaki has been nothing but accommodating and respectful so far. And even if he had not been, we, as a medico-legal laboratory funded by the federal government, are treading dangerous water right now. The security at our lab has somehow allowed the integrity of a federal murder case to be compromised. Do you understand how we might need to treat our ANBU agent with latex gloves, so to speak?"

Sakura's lips were still pressed together. She met Sarutobi's eyes, but with great effort and with a flush burning the back of her neck. Somehow, it was harder to meet Sarutobi's patient, unaccusing gaze than it had been to meet the burning glares ones of any of her drill sergeants.

She was being unprofessional, and she knew it. Realizing that she found Uzumaki attractive had shoved her off balance. Being attracted to him, whether he knew that she was or not, gave him power over her, a power that she didn't want anyone to have. And she had been clawing, kicking, and yowling against it like a cat being dragged to a bath. To her, her defense mechanism made sense, but to everyone else, she must seem like she was acting like a bratty grade schooler.

Looking up, she saw that Dr. Sarutobi was still watching her, waiting for a response.

Sakura cleared her throat. "Yes, sir. I understand."

Dr. Sarutobi seemed to wilt a little with relief. "Then please go talk to him. I've sent him to your office."

Sakura's eye twitched at the thought of the ANBU agent being in her office. But she said, "Yes, sir," and headed for the short hallway that separated the main forensic lab from the office area.

With several bone artifacts from digs she'd gone on during grad school and a hideous dark pink leather sofa that Human Resources had left there, Sakura's office was a little better decorated than her apartment. Sakura found herself wondering whether Uzumaki would notice.

The path of her thoughts made her jaw clench, tightening even further when she realized that Uzumaki was the only person she knew who had seen both her apartment and her office. Even Lee and Tenten hadn't seen both.

The front wall of her office was glass, looking out onto the hallway. Through it, she could see Uzumaki standing in front of her desk, fingering something on it.

When she strode inside, he snatched his hand away. The object clattered to her neat desktop, and she saw that it was one of the lacquered stress balls that Lee had given her for her birthday. They were custom-made, a deep green with pink cherry blossom petals painted across it, edged with thin gold.

She went to her desk, put her hand on top of the ball to stop it from rolling off the edge, and looked at Uzumaki.

He was rubbing the back of his neck, grinning sheepishly. "Sorry. I shouldn't have touched without asking."

Sakura put the ball back into its cushioned box with its fellow and sat down in her desk chair. "Dr. Sarutobi said you needed something?"

"Yeah." Uzumaki lowered himself into the chair before her desk. "I'm talking to Ms. Yamanaka again this afternoon. I thought you might help me translate?"

Sakura narrowed her eyes. "Considering that you speak Japanese yourself and that I could be doing much more useful work here at the lab, I don't see why you would need help with that, Agent Uzumaki."

Uzumaki blinked at her. He had been leaning forward, hands between his knees, the way he had when speaking to the Yamanaka girl the previous day. But now he sank back into the seat, shoulders hitting the back.

"Um," he said. "Okay. I just–well, I figured you were pretty eager to get out of the lab the other day, so…"

Sakura didn't say anything, and he trailed off.

"Alright," he said then, and seemed to gather himself, straightening up. He set his hands on her desk. He suddenly seemed so business-like that he actually seemed to belong in the ANBU suit he was wearing. "My other question was about this liver fiasco. Dr. Sarutobi said nothing like this has ever happened at the lab before."

Sakura's brows knit. "Of course it hasn't! We're very careful with everything here." Her voice was defensive. "You can't even touch a set of remains without filling out a form to say what you touched and how many pairs of gloves you were wearing when you touched it."

A bit of the Uzumaki she was accustomed to peeked out from behind the brisk agent persona in the form of a grin tilting one side of his mouth.

But he continued, "And you're sure there wasn't a liver with Nara's remains when you performed the autopsy two days ago?"

Sakura glared at him. "_Yes_. We already had this conversation, yesterday."

"You know how you guys have to fill out forms about touching remains?" he said cheerfully. "Us ANBU have to fill out forms about questioning everyone involved in cases. So just grin and bear it with me, Haruno-_san_."

Her eyes widened a little at his use of the Japanese honorific. She had never heard it paired with her name. In Konoha-cho, she had always been _ome-e_, or _onna no ko_, or _gaki._

It felt…strange.

"Can you think of any reasons someone would plant a liver in a set of remains?"

Sakura pushed away the distracting thoughts about her name, trying to recollect her thoughts. Slowly, she said, "Well, clearly, whoever it was didn't want us to realize the liver was missing."

Uzumaki's lips hitched up again. "No kidding, Dr. Obvious."

Sakura's eyes flashed. "Out!"

Uzumaki stood up, clearly fighting back a smile at her expense. "Maybe I'll just ask you the rest of my questions later," he said, inching toward the door.

"Maybe you will," said Sakura furiously, flushing. How dare he refer back to the fool she'd made out of herself because he'd lied to her about not knowing Japanese!

He paused in the doorway, fingers wrapped around the jamb. "Actually, I was going to talk to Ms. Yamanaka this afternoon. I would appreciate a translator – "

"OUT –" began Sakura.

And cut off as Dr. Sarutobi appeared in the doorway behind Uzumaki.

"Agent Uzumaki," he said politely to the agent, although his eyes were on Sakura's, warningly. "I hope Dr. Haruno is proving helpful? I know that she has promised me that she will give you every assistance you require."

Uzumaki's eyes flicked to Sakura's. He had his eyebrow cocked expectantly, a slight grin touching his lips again.

Sakura huffed and shot to her feet, coming around the desk. "Yes! Yes, I'm being helpful."

"Very helpful," agreed Uzumaki, ducking a nod at Dr. Sarutobi. "Thank you, sir."

"Very good," said Sarutobi, heading back out of the office.

When his footsteps had faded in the distance, Uzumaki turned, holding his arm out for Sakura.

She stalked past it to the door.

-

"I still don't see why I had to come," she said as they sat in lunch-time traffic fifteen minutes later. Uzumaki had the AC cranked up to full volume to combat the noon sunlight beating through the windshield and had an oldies radio station playing in the background, but the car still seemed to yawn with awkward silence. "You know Japanese." She paused here to shoot him an evil eye so that he would pick up on the fact that he should feel guilty for concealing this fact.

"And even if you didn't," she continued, "the almighty ANBU must have its own translators."

"Probably," said Uzumaki offhandedly, accelerating slightly as the light finally turned green. He glanced over at her. "But I thought you wanted to get out of the lab."

Her breath caught despite herself. She stared at his profile, heart beating hard. Did he know? He was ANBU; he could have looked at her record. But if he had, he wouldn't be helping her go into the field. He would have been very careful to make sure she stayed _in_ the lab so he wouldn't get into trouble.

Wouldn't he?

A street sign outside the window caught her attention. "Hang on," she said. "I thought we were going to the ANBU building?" That was where ANBU agents usually interrogated people involved in murder investigation. And Yamanaka, despite her tears yesterday, was a suspect in Nara's murder. Significant others always were.

"To talk to Yamanaka?" Uzumaki glanced over at her. "How do you expect her to get there? No way does she have the money to waste on a cab. And you can't make a pregnant woman walk that far."

"Maybe she should have thought about that before she got pregnant," muttered Sakura, but it was a tired, knee-jerk response. She stared out the window at the increasingly shabby, familiar streets, and didn't notice the look that Uzumaki shot her.

-

"Tell me again why you need to talk to Yamanaka again?"

Naruto looked at Dr. Haruno as they walked away from the SUV. It was the first thing she had said since her bitter words on the drive to Konoha-cho. It occurred to him that perhaps, despite her _nothing-can-touch-me_ attitude, she had been even more uncomfortable with their silence than he had.

Sasuke had been like that. He measured his words out like they were gold, too precious to be given to other people, but when he was the one being given the silent treatment, he couldn't stand it. He would find some way to nudge the other person into talking–usually Naruto and usually by some insult muttered under his breath.

The memory tugged Naruto's lips upward. His eyes refocused on Haruno and saw her eyeing him with suspicion-narrowed eyes.

"I see," she said. "This is more of a personal indulgence."

Naruto blinked at her. As she cocked an eyebrow, putting a hand on her hip, her meaning sank into him.

"What?" he exclaimed. "N-n – Haruno, no! Are you crazy?" His eyes swirled with the very inappropriateness of what she was insinuating. "She just lost her boyfriend!"

"Who she may or may not have murdered," said Haruno, turning her attention back to the tenement building they were approaching.

In the glaring noon day sun, her pale pink hair shone so light it looked almost colorless, like Yamanaka's. Naruto studied it, thinking of the pregnant young woman and the one walking in front of him.

Dr. Haruno spoke so unforgivingly of Yamanaka, like somehow she was offended by her. While he was willing to admit, despite how much his adoptive mother had drilled into him never to call a woman such a thing, that Haruno was a bit of a bitch, he had figured her to be a defensive bitch. Like the women he'd undergone ANBU training with, who were icy and hard-eyed because everyone doubted their rights to be in ANBU and they had something to prove. Dr. Haruno was one of the only females he'd seen in the lab; probably she had to jealousy guard her right to be there. Especially if all the ANBU agents she'd worked with had treated her as cavalierly as Kankurou seemed to have done.

Still, during basic training, Naruto had had a nightmare drill instructor, Anko, who was always an inch away from kicking the guys' asses while cheering on any female recruits. Dr. Haruno, he had expected, would be the same, would be sympathetic and protective of the Yamanaka girl, not act like she had some sort of personal vendetta against the woman…

Naruto looked again at the anthropologist's back as she led the way up the stairs of Yamanaka's tenement building. It was tensed, the knob at the base of her neck protruding slightly as she rolled her shoulder blades. Perspiration had glued a few pink strands of hair from her ponytail to the nape of her neck. They curled there, trembling slightly, as though they were as tense as Haruno herself.

He licked his lips. Then, as he tasted the sweat from his own upper lip, he realized what he had done and how closely he had been watching Haruno.

Quickly, he stepped past her on the landing to Yamanaka's door. He fixed his eyes on it and knocked once, twice, three times.

It only took a few seconds for Yamanaka to open the door. Her eyes were as red as they had been the day before, but this time they were lined thickly with dark eyeliner and green eye shadow. She wore strappy heels, a tight miniskirt, and a plunging top under a sequined vest that was tight but just bulky enough that, had Naruto not seen her the day before, he wouldn't have realized today she was pregnant.

The girl let them in without saying anything, although her eyes went combatively to Dr. Haruno next to Naruto. As soon as they were both inside, she closed the door and went to the cracked vanity mirror in the corner of the room, leaning close to apply lipstick.

She seemed as unaffected today as she had been affected the day before. Naruto watched her with a more observant eye, watching the way her hands shook as she applied the light pink lipstick. Were they shaking with grief, because she still couldn't believe what had happened to Nara? With exhaustion, because even though he was gone, she still had to find some way to make money to live? With fear, because she had had some part in her boyfriend's death and now an ANBU agent was interrogating her?

He didn't believe Yamanaka had truly played a part in Nara's murder. Or he didn't want to, rather. She could have been one of the little girls at the orphanage he lived at in Konoha-cho before he was adopted, and he couldn't imagine arresting any of them. But he knew this district changed people – the proof was in front of him, in the exotic dancer get-up Yamanaka was wearing. The girls at his orphanage hadn't been sex toys when he knew them, but it would be idiotic of him to think that they had all escaped that fate. That any of them had, really. There were only so many ways for girls in Konoha-cho to survive.

Naruto forced himself to think objectively. He'd never worked one himself, but he knew a few agents who had investigated homicides in which exotic dancers were victims or suspects. There was almost always some sort of love triangle. If Yamanaka had attracted the attention of another man, Nara might have discovered it and tried to exact retribution. Maybe the men had fought, and Nara had been killed. Maybe Yamanaka had helped, if she preferred the new man to Nara. There were numerous possibilities.

He sighed. "We have a few more questions, Ms. Yamanaka."

To distract himself from the uneasiness roiling in his stomach, he listened to Dr. Haruno translate his words.

Her Japanese was as clipped and deliberate as it had been the day before, nothing like Yamanaka's faster speech or the soft cadence he could remember Mikoto-kaa-san's voice using. Haruno spoke it like she was reading off bone measurements, clinical and emotionless. She had probably learned it at a university out of a textbook. He wondered why she would have chosen to learn Japanese, instead of some other language, when she seemed to hate Konoha-cho so much, with her constant grimaces as they walked through the streets.

As she listened to Haruno's translation, Yamanaka's lips pressed tighter and tighter.

"I understand we upset you yesterday," Naruto pressed, noting her reluctance. "But these questions are very important."

As Haruno translated, the girl gave a sharp jerk of a nod. She put down her lipstick.

"You said the last time you saw him was about two weeks ago?"

"Yes," Yamanaka said in Japanese after a moment. "He was going to a job. He had started taking a lot of them, after I told him about the baby.

"And you're sure you don't know who he was working these jobs for?" Naruto pressed, repeating a question that she had evaded the day before.

The question upset her, that much was clear from the sudden tremor of her eyelids, but he needed to know. He repeated the question as she turned away. He made his voice unyielding.

Dr. Haruno translated perfectly, right down to his hard tone, but she made an addition to her translation. "If you don't tell us who he was working for, you will be arrested for obstruction of justice."'

Yamanaka's eyes went wide. Naruto barely managed to keep his own from doing the same.

The girl turned toward him. "_Onegai_," she whispered. "I have to live here. There's nowhere else for me to go if they find out I told you."

For the first time since they had entered the apartment, the vulnerability she had shown the day before was surfacing, her eyes filming over with tears.

Naruto steeled himself, barely hearing Haruno's emotionless translation. "We can protect you, Ms. Yamanaka, but we need to know."

She closed her eyes. Her hand went to her stomach, clenching in the fabric of the vest.

Then she stood up, going back to the mirror.

"Akimichi," she said in Japanese. "He worked for Akimichi-_gumi_." She lifted her tube of lipstick. "Now please leave."

-

"So she's already so eager to get back to work," Haruno said as they stepped out of the stagnant air of the tenement building into the equally thick humidity of the street. "Doesn't seem like Nara's death affected her much."

Naruto's hackles rose at her criticism. Had she not seen how emaciated Yamanaka was, how much she must need money to feed herself and the baby growing inside her?

He forced his anger down. Somehow, he managed to keep his voice steady instead and professional.

"I understand that I asked you to come help me, Dr. Haruno. But if you ever mistranslate my words the way you did today, there will be…" He struggled to keep his voice and words appropriate. "…consequences."

Haruno returned his serious stare. Then she looked away, lips compressed into a white-tinged line, and slid on a pair of sunglasses. The lenses were green, darkening her eyes to almost the same dark green as the pair of stress balls that he had been playing with on her desk.

He had been intrigued by them, noting the _sakura_ petals painted across them and wondering if she knew that they were her namesakes. For all that Konoha-cho was looked down on by the rest of Fire Country, for several years, Japanese names had been all the rage throughout the country. Naruto had thought, perhaps with an unfair amount of bitterness, that her parents had probably named her without even having a clue what the word meant.

But now he found himself remembering the last time he had seen her lips pressed so tightly together that the skin around them turned white. It had been when he first met her a few days ago, as they lifted Nara's remains onto her examination table. He had thought that her expression had been because of the smell of decomposing flesh, but now he remembered how her deathly pale colleague had said something about the cho-ho who had found the remains.

He remembered how Sasuke, whenever they were around Uchiha family members, had seemed to turn to stone, his jaw clenched and his eyes like fire in his granite face.

Naruto stopped in the parking lot, a few feet away from his SUV.

"Dr. Haruno," he heard himself say.

She turned, arching a pink brow.

"Are you from Konoha-cho?"

* * *

**A/N:** Comments on what you think of Naruto's point of view and of Sakura and Naruto's interaction would definitely be welcomed.


	5. Chapter 5

**Title:** Scar Tissue

**Author:** 8sword

**Chapter:** 5

**Date:** 3.24.10

**Summary**: An unsettling new case and an even more unsettling new ANBU agent inject chaos into forensic anthropologist Haruno Sakura's methodical life.

**Author's Notes:** Apologies for the delay. I'm bothered by how little forensic work Sakura seems to be doing, but I haven't been able to manipulate the plot otherwise.

**Disclaimer: **Masashi Kishimoto owns Naruto.

-

_"Are you from Konoha-cho?"_

The August humidity was so stifling that her shirt clung to her with perspiration. But it was a fresh, hotter heat that swept through Sakura, dilating the capillaries along her face and neck in a flush of embarrassment and anger.

Of course she was from Konoha-cho! And he knew it, of course he must know it, what kind of bastard was he to rub it in–?

She rocked forward on her toes, opening her mouth and glaring up into his eyes…

...and she saw that they were curious and clear, squinched up in the same concerned expression he had directed at Yamanaka.

Sakura's anger faltered. Her mind sped over the past few days. It came to a screeching halt when she realized that not once had she, or anyone else, said anything about her being from Konoha-cho.

Her weight fell back onto her heels.

She was so used to people knowing that she was from Konoha-cho. When she was a kid, walking into her first day of school in hand-me-down clothes emblazoned with the Konoha-cho Municipal Children's Home patch. When she was a teenager, hunching in jackets even during the summer term because her hand-me-down bras didn't fit right and the deodorant that the matron handed out did hardly anything to mask the sharp odor of sweat. When she was a young woman finally attending university, not knowing which fork she was supposed to use at the Dean's List dinners because she had never learned. The people around her, the other kids at school or girls in the bathroom or students at the dinners, would exchange glances and sometimes furtive smirks and whisper behind their hands, and she knew that they knew she was just a cho-ho, like it was stamped across her huge forehead.

It had bred a self-consciousness in her that had never died; it still lurked, like a shadow at the corner of her eye, the first conclusion that she jumped to any time someone looked at her in a way that made her feel uncomfortable.

But she wouldn't let Uzumaki know all this. She would never let _anyone_ know all of this.

Instead, she tossed her head carelessly, as though he had just asked her something trivial, like whether she liked chocolate. "Yes, I grew up in Konoha-cho. I thought you already knew."

"No!" His exclamation was one of pleasure, suddenly; a grin was unfurling on his tan face. "I had no clue! I totally thought you must have learned Japanese at school or something." He raked a hand through his hair, still staring at her like a hundred-dollar bill he had just found lying in the middle of the road. Then he shook his head, whistling lowly. "That really…"

Sakura couldn't understand why this was such a big deal. "What?"

He sneaked a look over at her as they got into the car. "Nothing."

Sakura frowned despite her plan of acting like she could care less. "Nothing?"

Uzumaki laughed, his hand going behind his head. "Nothing!" he repeated. He began to reverse the car out of the parking lot.

Her frown deepened. But she turned away, looking out of the window. After a few streets, she asked, again with her light, not-that-it-matters-I'm-just-curious tone, "What made you realize I was from Konoha-cho?"

Uzumaki took a minute to answer, waiting until they were stopped at a red light. Before he did, he took a breath. Sakura turned her head to watch him.

"It was the only reason I could think of for why you were being such a bitch to Yamanaka," he said plainly.

-

When Sakura strode onto the main lab floor, her boots clicking on the glossy floor, Rin was standing at the foot of the stairs to her lab platform.

"If I see you within two meters of my lab platform again, even Shizune won't be able to identify your body." Sakura's voice was as sharp as the click of her boots.

The graduate assistant stared back at her, wide-eyed, and stammered something. Sakura ignored it, staring at her wordlessly until the younger woman finally turned and practically ran away.

Sakura turned, swiped her card, and climbed the platform steps.

"Good job making the grad assistant cry, Dr. Haruno," said Sai quietly from his station.

Snapping on gloves, Sakura didn't bother glancing at him to figure out if he was being sarcastic. "What have you found?"

"Shino's flies finished hatching. He says the number of generations pushes back the postmortem interval, closer to two weeks."

Sakura strode to the examination table. Despite her relative unfamiliarity with soft tissue, she did know that a two-week old corpse should have undergone more decomposition than they had found on Nara's body.

However… She remembered the lividity that had been present on Nara's knuckles and his fully flexed case of rigor mortis. These two details had suggested that he had been put in a garbage can-sized container before ending up in the Konoha-cho dumpster. If that container had been airtight, it could explain why the decomposition rate had been slowed…but flies must have already been present, on him or in the container, when he was placed inside it.

Had Nara's body intentionally been moved out of that original container, or had it been by accident that he ended up in the Dumpster where his remains were discovered?

Sakura removed her gloves, grabbing a fresh piece of file paper, dating it at the top, and writing down the conclusions she had just made. ANBU agents weren't the only ones who had to fill out forms for every little thing that had to do with a case; she, Sai, and Shino, had to repeatedly document their data and any hypotheses that could be drawn from them as well.

When she was done, she put on gloves again and grabbed the autopsy magnifying lens, still mounted on its extendable arm.

"Did you find anything with this?"

"Nothing but some of the bone porosity that you would expect from someone with malnutrition."

Sakura positioned the lens over Nara's lumbar vertebrae and glanced at the magnified image on the screen.

"Ah," she murmured, tracing the lowest rib's curve with her gloved fingertip. "Sai, increase the magnification, please."

Sai tapped a key on the computer and readjusted the metal-armed, plate-sized magnifying lens over Nara's skeleton. Following Sakura's gaze, he turned to regard the image monitor.

"_There_ you are," she said, spotting a tiny kerf mark on the ventral side of the L2 vertebral body.

The sight swelled her chest with relief, lifting the apprehensive weight from her stomach. Her cursory examination of Nara's bones the day before had not revealed any visible weapon marks, which was extremely unusual in a case involving sharp force trauma. She had begun to fear, with a deep, guilty dread, that by defleshing Nara's body so quickly, she had gotten rid of any proof they might have been able to find of a murder weapon.

But this kerf mark, left on the vertebra by some sort of sharp edge, was exactly what she needed.

"We never would have found this on the X-rays," Sai murmured, already keying the image into the special software on his computer that would allow him to digitally measure the kerf mark's width and depth. "Good call defleshing the body, Dr. Haruno."

"Finish taking the photos and send them to Uzumaki with the measurement," said Sakura, straightening up. "I'll go tell Dr. Sarutobi we've finally found something."

She found Sarutobi in his office, but he was on the phone, holding the receiver to his ear with a grave expression. He motioned to her to come in, however. She sat, knee fidgeting, pretending not to listen as he said, "No, Director Danzou, I understand. We will…well, you will have to take that up with a higher power. You have your jurisdiction, and we have ours."

There was a sound of someone talking through the mouthpiece, and then Sakura heard, quite clearly, the sound of a dial tone.

"Well," said Dr. Sarutobi, returning the phone to its cradle. "What good timing you have, Dr. Haruno."

"Sir?"

"That was ANBU's director." Dr. Sarutobi pinched the bridge of his nose. "He was calling to advise me that instead of trying to solve the murder of a nameless Konoha-cho citizen, we should be focusing on our own lax security. His wording, not mine, obviously."

"He's telling us…to stop working on _his_ case?" said Sakura slowly, lifting an eyebrow. All her own anger about the liver was swept away with indignation at an ANBU idiot presuming to judge _her_ lab.

"Not literally, no," said Sarutobi. He paused. "He was merely expressing his displeasure and tacitly reminding me of the tenuous ground we are currently on after that compromising liver." He rose from his chair, wincing as his knee popped. "Which is why I would like to take the opportunity to encourage you again, Dr. Haruno, to solve this case as quickly as possible. _Even,_" he said loudly as she opened her mouth, "if it means working more closely with Agent Uzumaki than you would prefer. Now, do you have anything to report to me?"

Sakura made a dissatisfied sound but launched into a brief explanation of what she and Sai had discovered on the bones.

"It's a start," said Sarutobi, steepling his fingers. "Please continue, and I'll ask Dr. Aburame if any particulates might tell us what the original container for the remains were. It might help us find the scene of death."

-

Returning to the lab platform, Sakura repositioned the magnifying lens on the kerf mark on the L2 vertebra.

"It's barely even a full kerf mark," she said, leaning close to the computer monitor to squint at the image. "Look how thin it is. And there's just one. No false starts, no wastage…"

Wastage was a common–practically ubiquitous–result of sharp force trauma to bone. The force of the weapon separated tiny fragments of bone tissue from the bone, and these fragments were called wastage. False starts were equally common, occurring when a sharp weapon made contact with the bone without enough force behind it to cut through completely, forcing the weapon's wielder to pull the blade free and attempt the cut again. The marks left behind by false starts could be matched to specific weapons, which made them invaluable in murder weapon identification.

Without either of them visible on the vertebra, finding out _what_ was used to kill Nara–and _who _used it–would be exponentially more difficult.

And the absence of both of them on the vertebra…

Sakura straightened up. "I think whoever inflicted this damage may have had experience cutting through bodies."

Sai was typing the kerf measurements into the data records. "Soft tissue or bone tissue?"

"Possibly both."

Sai clicked his tongue. "This wasn't just a run-of-the-mill cho-ho brawl, then?"

Sakura grimaced, ignoring both his wording and the thoughts of Agent Uzumaki that it inevitably swirled up.

As if by cue, her cell phone suddenly buzzed where she had left it beside the computer. Glancing at it, she saw AGENT UZUMAKI glowing on the screen.

She ground her teeth at it, still acutely aware of what an _idiot_ she'd made of herself earlier that day. All that time, Uzumaki had genuinely thought she was a genuine citizen, not someone second-class from Konoha-cho. Her brains, her behavior, her appearance, had all fooled him. How goddamned ironic that what _had_ tipped him off that she was a cho-ho was her hatred of Konoha-cho and everyone there. The irony was bitter, like the realization that she could cover up her outside as much as she wanted with expensive haircuts and brand-name clothes, but her insides would stay as dingy and foul as the orphanage where she had grown up.

"Aren't you going to answer?"

Sakura jumped, her elbow reflexively jabbing backward. Sai, who had leaned over her shoulder to see the phone screen, doubled over with a gasped expletive.

"Sorry," Sakura said, not very enthusiastically, because Sai shouldn't have been so close to her in the first place. Then she picked up her phone. "Haruno speaking."

"I tracked down Akimichi!"

Uzumaki's tone was excited, proud, and totally devoid of any of the uneasiness or contempt she might have been afraid (without admitting it to herself) that he would harbor toward her after their conversation earlier.

She could be the same way, she decided. After all, that had been her tack, hadn't it? To pretend his finding out where she was from wasn't a big deal. Yes. Yes, she could do that.

Sakura cleared her throat. "How?"

Distracted as she was by her own inner turmoil, she still noticed the hesitant pause Uzumaki took before saying, "I have a friend. He does…business in Konoha-cho."

His hesitance and the vague way he phrased this could only meant one thing: whatever this business his friend did, it was shady. Sakura pursed her lips, drumming her fingers against the phone. Not that she cared that much about Uzumaki's safety; he'd called her a bitch, after all, but…

"He said he knows how to get to Akimichi's place," Uzumaki continued.

"And how do you know you can trust this…friend?" Sakura gave _friend_ the same inflection that he had given _business._

The other end of the line was quiet for a split second. When Uzumaki spoke, his voice was a few degrees frostier than it had been. "He's an old friend of the family."

Sakura resisted the urge to snort. She could just picture Uzumaki's family: probably a happy, bustling swarm of bright-eyed blonds with nothing to worry about. For all that Uzumaki had said he was from Konoha, Sakura still didn't believe it had been for very long. There was no way a cho-ho would end up the way he had: cheerful, careless, and an ANBU agent.

Uzumaki was still quiet on the other end of the line. Sakura could sense that she had overstepped a boundary, questioning the trustworthiness of his friend, but he was being stupid. There were no such things as friends in Konoha-cho. Yamanaka and her dead boyfriend were proof of that; they were having a baby together, but Yamanaka hadn't even been able to trust him enough to know that he hadn't skipped out on her. Sakura was right, Uzumaki was being stupid, and she wasn't going to apologize for bringing up valid concerns.

Instead, she said, "Where is this Akimichi guy, then?"

She heard Uzumaki inhale slowly. "Somewhere in Konoha-cho. Kisame said he'd show us the way tomorrow."

Sakura's brows rose. "Us?"

"I wasn't kidding when I said I suck at speaking Japanese, Haruno!"

"Have your family friend play translator, then!" Sakura retorted.

"Kisame won't get tangled up in this. He didn't even want to go with us to show us the way to Akimichi's place."

"Oh, so he can lead us into a trap and then prance off into safety, but we can't even pretend to be suspicious that he's walking us into a trap?"

"He's not going to walk us into a trap!" Uzumaki snapped. For a single, ridiculous moment, Sakura found herself wondering what his eyes looked like at that minute, if they were flashing bright with anger or darkening with it. "I wouldn't take you with me if I thought there was even a one percent chance that Kisame was gonna sell me out! I _thought_ you wanted to get out in the field, so here I was giving you a chance, but if you're scared, then stay in your precious lab."

He stayed on the line for a few more seconds, breathing heavily; then he hung up.

Sakura lowered her phone from her ear. She was too proud to call him back, to tell him wait, she'd go.

But when he came out to his SUV in the apartment parking lot the next morning, she was leaning against it, waiting.

-

Naruto didn't consider himself to be a willfully defiant person, no matter what his adoptive father had always said. But there had to be a reason that, when he had tracked down Kisame the day before, he had called Haruno and tried to get her to accompany him.

Her fiery refusal only increased his awareness of the foolishly reckless path he had somehow veered onto. He was being irresponsible, not only by disobeying ANBU protocol (he had looked at the manual after that conversation with Kankurou) but by putting Haruno, who was a civilian, into unnecessary danger.

Sure, she could twist his arm nearly out of his socket too fast for him to see, but that wouldn't do much good against the armed men Akimichi Chouji was sure to have surrounded himself by.

He tried to keep this in mind when he stumbled downstairs, yawning, at nine o'clock the next morning and saw her leaning against his car.

She pushed away from it when she saw him. "When are you going to Akimichi's?"

He unlocked his car door and slid inside. "Don't worry about it."

She caught his door before he could close it. "I'm coming."

Her voice was low, almost as intense as her eyes and the heat radiating from her arm. Naruto cleared his throat. "I said not to worry about it, Dr. Haruno–"

"And I said I'm coming."

"I made a mistake. I shouldn't have asked you–"

He broke off as she let go of his door. In his side mirror, her reflection stalked away.

Feeling simultaneously disappointed and relieved, Naruto blew out a sigh. Then he shut his door and reached for his seat belt.

The passenger door flew open. Haruno stood there, glaring green daggers at him from beneath her side-swept pink bangs.

"I'm coming," she repeated. She climbed into the passenger seat and buckled the seatbelt. "Let's go."

Naruto didn't move. Now he felt simultaneously excited and reluctant. But much more of the first than the latter. But still, he forced himself to say, "You know how irresponsible this is for me to do, right?"

"You do know how irresponsible it was of you to offer to?" she retorted. "But you did, so now you're stuck. Drive."

He tried, one last time, although there was a grin, for some reason, fighting its way onto his face. "You don't have a gun."

Haruno had taken the clip out of her hair and had it in her mouth to give herself a French braid. She glanced sideways at him and said, around the clip, "Are you offering me yours?"

Naruto faced forward and pulled out of the parking lot. He told himself it was so that she wouldn't see him grinning, but he knew it was really so that he wouldn't do something else.

He cleared his throat and tugged at his collar. "Wanna turn on the AC?"


	6. Chapter 6

**Title:** Scar Tissue

**Author:** 8sword

**Chapter:** 6

**Date:** 4.2.2010

**Summary**: An unsettling new case and an even more unsettling new ANBU agent inject chaos into forensic anthropologist Haruno Sakura's methodical life.

**Author's Notes:** So many Favorite Alerts, so few reviews. Siiiiigh. Thanks to everyone who did review. I really appreciate the feedback so that I know when Sakura's angst is making sense and when it's not.

By the way, I may very likely be temporarily removing the first story of this chapter. I want to use a few things from it in a class assignment, so don't freak out if one day it's not there. I will be putting it back when I'm done. While it's gone, I might post a deleted scene or something.

LANGUAGE warning for this chapter. Bleeping Kisame.

**Disclaimer: **Masashi Kishimoto owns Naruto. All non-Naruto proper nouns are owned by people who are not me.

* * *

This time, Uzumaki drove the SUV further into the Konoha-cho district, patiently navigating his way through the throngs of people in the streets. It stretched the drive nearly forty-five minutes longer than it would have lasted otherwise, ending when they eventually parked on Kage Street in the cramped parking lot of a convenience store/gas station with only one gas pump.

"Kisame told me to park here," Uzumaki explained when Sakura glanced at him quizzically. "And I figure it's probably better to be parked closer anyway, in case we need to make a quick get-away. Not that we will," he added hastily.

Sakura didn't call him on his slip-up. Now that they were here, and she was out of the lab again, adrenaline was seeping into her, catalyzing her earlier misgivings into excitement.

She still wished she had a gun, though. A nice little Colt would fit perfectly at her hip.

Opening the door, she swung her legs to the ground. "It's a bit early," she said doubtfully, squinting at the mid-morning sunlight as she slipped her sunglasses from where they hung from her collar. "Is Akimichi even going to be awake at eleven in the morning?"

"Apparently he likes to get started drinking early," said Uzumaki's voice from the other side of the SUV. "Works for us, since I'd rather not have an audience while we ask him if he's a murderer."

Sakura heard him shut his door; then he came around the front hood. She saw that he was pushing his own pair of sunglasses onto his nose. They were dark black, not lightly tinted like her green ones, and she wondered if he could even see in them.

"I know," he said, apparently interpreting her skeptical expression. "They're regulation issue. I'm trying to follow as many rules as I can to make up for the ones I'm breaking."

It was the second time he'd referred to the fact that he really shouldn't have brought her along. Sakura eyed him, trying to figure out why he had asked her in the first place if it was such a no-no. There was a reason, one that had to do with how awkward he had seemed when he asked her to turn on the AC when they were driving. But if it wasn't true, she didn't even want to embarrass herself by entertaining the hope that it was. So she shoved it from her mind.

The street around them was bustling, preparing for the lunch hour. The omnipresent stench of fish clogged the air as thickly as the ramshackle food carts clogged the narrow, cobbled street. The smell of frying fish and dough mixed into the fish stench just enough to make it bearable but not quite enough to make Sakura's stomach grumble hungrily. Uzumaki seemed to be a different story; he was rubbing his stomach and eyeing one of the takoyaki vendors on the curb speculatively.

She side-stepped a cooler full of ice and raw, dead fish with their blank eyes. Shaking her head at the woman's offer of, "Sushi? Two for price of one!" she jogged a little to catch up with Uzumaki, who had reached the takoyaki vendor's corner. "Where are we meeting your friend?"

"Right…here." He handed the vendor some coins, took a plate of the dumplings, and plopped down on the curb. He popped two of the balls into his mouth, one for each cheek, and then held the plate out to her. "Wan' one?"

Sakura shook her head and looked around gingerly. It didn't seem like a good idea to just plop down in such an exposed spot – not to mention on the ground night next to a bunch of fish vendors, who knew what kind of bacteria were swimming all over the concrete?

Compromising, she sat down Indian-style on the curb next to him but facing in the opposite direction, so that no one would be able to come up behind them without her noticing.

A glance through the corner of her eyes revealed that he was laughing at her. She huffed a little but didn't get a chance to say anything because Uzumaki spoke first.

"This was my favorite street," he said, leaning back on one hand, turning his head slowly back and forth to take in all the people streaming down the sidewalks and through the road. "Back when I lived in Konoha-cho. You must have come here, right?"

Sakura stiffened a little, expecting him to start prying into her past. But his tone was only nostalgic; he didn't even seem to be listening closely for her answer. Instead, he was leaning to the side, peering toward something.

"See that dango stand?" He looked over to catch her eye and pointed toward it. She saw a small wooden stand with peeling white paint, a row of ten stools pulled up to a counter. "It used to be a ramen stand. The cook, Teuchi-san, he made the BEST ramen. I used to have such a crush on his daughter when I was a kid, I used to go there all the time. I don't think she even noticed me, but sometimes he'd give me free ramen." A happy grin had joined the nostalgia in his voice, his bright blue eyes unfocused as he stared at the dango stand. "I was kind of hoping they'd still be here so I could buy some of his miso ramen."

Sakura pulled her knees up to her chin. She could remember the ramen cook and his daughter, too, not because she had ever had the money to buy ramen for the stand but because she had seen Ayame-san sometimes, working in the shop, and been jealous of the older girl's bright smile and long, glossy hair and the way her father would ruffle it and smile at her.

They hadn't moved somewhere else, Sakura knew. Years ago, now, probably at least ten, because she couldn't have been much older than fifteen or sixteen when it happened, someone had held up the ramen stand for money while it was closing one night and shot Ayame and Teuchi. They'd both died. Sakura could remember seeing the blood splatters on the white pain on her way to school the morning after it happened.

"…their ramen probably got so popular that they made enough money to move somewhere else," Uzumaki was saying now.

Sakura, looking at his nostalgic grin, should have wanted to wipe it off his face. Even a day before, she would have told him the truth about Teuchi and Ayame so he would understand just how horrible Konoha-cho was and stop thinking that she was a bitch for hating it.

But she didn't say anything. She just dug her chin into her knees and watched the people passing them instead. There were tired-looking women in patched kimonos carrying baskets, sullen-looking children trudging after them, rail-thin men with their pant legs rolled up to their knees pedaling rickety bicycles with baskets of vegetables strapped behind the seats.

A potato toppled out of one woven basket as Sakura watched, and she followed it as it bounced down to the cobblestone and began to roll through the thicket of tramping feet. But nearly as quickly as its rolling had began, it stopped; Sakura blinked, wondering where it had gone, and just managed to glimpse the flash of brown as a hand stuffed it inside the front of a pair of frayed overalls.

She followed the overalls up to a face and saw that it belonged to a child. He – or she, she couldn't really tell with the curtain of dark hair falling over the child's face and obscuring its features – was probably no older than nine or ten, although with the malnutrition running rampant through Konoha-cho, he might even be as old as sixteen.

Uzumaki's shoulder suddenly bumped into Sakura's. She whipped around.

"Sorry, sorry!" apologized Uzumaki to her. He leaned away, shoving away the grimy shoe planted on his leg. "Geeze, Kisame, I just got these dry-cleaned!"

"Guess you should have been watching your surroundings more closely, then."

Sakura followed the voice and the leg up to the tall man standing over them. His hands were in the pockets of a long coat he wore despite the heat, and from her vantage point on the ground, squinting up into the sun, she couldn't quite make out his face. She shoved to her feet, ignoring Uzumaki's offered hand, berating herself internally for being distracted by the kid instead of noticing that Uzumaki's contact had showed up.

Her self-beration cut off, however, when she took in the appearance of Uzumaki's "friend."

At first sight, she could have mistaken him for a demon from one of the beaten-up storybooks at the orphanage. His entire head and neck, at first glance, looked dark blue-green, almost scaled. Only on close examination did it become clear that the color wasn't uniform but rather an effect created by hundreds of tattoos inked painstakingly across his skin. They covered everything, the sensitive skin around his eyes, his earlobes, his lips, even his scalp, visible beneath the faint black bristles on his head.

Only as her eyes returned back to his tattooed lips, wondering how he could have borne the pain of an ink needle with so many nerve endings located in the tissue there, did she realize that he was smiling at her – or not so much smiling as baring his teeth. Sharp, filed-to-points teeth.

"Why don't you just take a picture?" he said to her coldly.

"Maa, c'mon, Kisame, you can't expect to get all those tattoos and NOT have people stare at them," Uzumaki defended. "Don't be such a drama queen."

Kisame looked at Uzumaki, his sharp teeth still bared. "If you didn't have a gun on you right now…"

"But I do, and the holster's making me sweat like crazy, so let's get going and get this over with." Uzumaki knit his hands behind his head. "Which way are we heading, nii-san?"

Kisame glared him for one more minute, then flicked a flint-eyed glance at Sakura. "What about her?"

"She's coming, too," said Uzumaki comfortably. "Her name's Haruno. She's a forensic anthropologist."

Sakura gave a nod to Kisame. "Nice to meet you."

Kisame didn't say anything, just looked back at her for a minute and then back at Naruto. "What're you bringing her along for, idiot?"

"Because you're too cowardly to go with him," said Sakura under her breath.

Kisame wheeled around. "Bitch–"

"Hey!" Uzumaki shoved between them. "Calm down!"

Kisame snarled something at Uzumaki in Japanese. His Japanese had a strange inflection, not quite an accent, but Sakura understood him perfectly nonetheless. "I'm not gonna let some fucking bitch from Second District call me a –"

"This fucking bitch grew up in Konoha-cho," snapped Sakura. Anger was licking her like flames. She should have been flattered to have been mistaken as someone from Second District, which was known for its wealthy residents, wealthy schools, wealthy everything. But instead, for a reason she didn't understand and didn't bother trying to, she felt insulted and angry.

Kisame had stopped talking. He watched her now, the hard skin around his black eyes unsoftened. He took a step toward her. "And do you still live here now, fucking bitch?"

Sakura held her ground, internally seething. "No."

A humorless smirk curved the man's thin lips. "Then you don't have a fucking _clue_ what's going on in Konoha-cho right now. There's way bigger shit hitting the fan than your sticky-fingered pill-pusher."

He yanked his arm from Uzumaki's grip. Then he turned and stalked down the street, away from where they had parked the car.

"Come on," said Uzumaki lowly to Sakura.

They strode after Kisame. Still breathing hard, Sakura refused to wonder if Uzumaki was mad at her for angering his friend. She didn't care if he was.

He shot her an apologetic little smile, though, answering the question that she had refused to answer, and gave her a little shrug as though to say, what can you do? Sakura's shoulders relaxed slightly as they squeezed through the bottleneck of people crowded near the pungent, fly-filled meat market.

When they had walked far enough away from the meat market that Sakura couldn't quite smell the stench on meat decaying in the sun anymore, Kisame stopped. He looked over his shoulder for them.

When Sakura and Uzumaki reached him, he lifted an arm and pointed.

"There," he said. "Akimichi-gumi's hide-out."

Sakura and Uzumaki followed his finger.

Uzumaki's forehead wrinkled. "That's…"

"…a barbecue joint," Sakura finished flatly. She glanced at Uzumaki with a lifted eyebrow, only to find him giving her the same wry, raised brow.

"Dunno why you're grinning at each other like that." Kisame's lips pulled back from his pointed teeth in an expression that could hardly be called a smile. "That's not the sort of place you go for a date. Especially not a pretty one like you, bitch."

"See?" said Uzumaki blithely to Sakura. "If he was going to sell us out, he wouldn't be warning us right now."

Sakura gave him a disbelieving look and was surprised and slightly repulsed to see that Kisame was giving him the same look, albeit with slightly more threat, considering his filed teeth and lack of eyebrows.

"I'm off," said the man. "I'll kill you if you ask me for a favor again, Naruto."

"Whatever, nii-san," said Uzumaki with a teasing and totally unintimidated grin. "Let's get some ramen together next time!"

Kisame made a snarling sound and disappeared into the people crowded in the streets.

-

The barbecue restaurant was dark, blocking out the sun's bright noon glare, and dimly lit. No wonder they started so early, Sakura thought. If she didn't know better, she would have thought it was nighttime in here.

There was a bar along the wall left of the entrance, and several tables, a few with people sitting at them and eating quietly, around it. The rest of the restaurant was lined with booths, tables scattered sparsely between, and these were mostly full, filled with men and a few women, eating and laughing.

The largest booth, a circular one near a door with a glowing EXIT sign above it, had a woman lying on her stomach top of it. She was kicking her legs slowly back and forth, and she wore an outfit even more revealing than Yamanaka's had been, so that Sakura looked away.

"No, wait," murmured Uzumaki. "That's where he is. Look at the guy in the middle of the booth."

Sakura looked again. The booth was full of at least eight women in outfits as scanty as that of the woman on the table, and there, in the center of the booth, just visible beyond the woman's moving legs, was a lean man with brown hair.

She frowned. From what rumors she had heard, through general conversation and from a few things she'd heard from Lee, Akimichi was supposed to be a disgustingly fat, food-gorging, alcoholic slug of a human being. Not someone thin enough to fit in a booth with eight other people.

She nudged Uzumaki. "I thought he was supposed to be obese."

"Yeah, he was," whispered Uzumaki. "A total pig. But apparently he had a gastric bypass, and now…" He trailed off with a shrug

Sakura eyed the women around Akimichi. "And now he satisfies other 'hungers' instead?" she suggested darkly.

The ANBU agent cracked a sour smile. "Yeah, apparently."

Sakura's eyes flicked toward the aproned waiter who was approaching them, probably about to ask why they hadn't sat down. "Come on, let's go deal with King Blob."

"King BLOB?" A voice came from their right.

They both turned. Sakura's muscles were coiled in anticipation.

A man with war paint tattooed down his face smiled at them with canine teeth that had been filed to points as sharp as Kisame's. If he ever ended up as an unidentified corpse – and Sakura had no doubt that he might – his dental pattern would make him extremely easy to identify.

"Your mouth's as big as your forehead, lady," said the man. Then he raised his voice. "Oi, Chouji! This bitch just called you a blob!"

All movement and music in the room ceased. Only the sound of sizzling meat continued. And Sakura's hiss at being called a bitch for the tenth time that dat.

Akimichi, eyes aflame, rose from his seat in the booth. He pushed the table in front of him away as easily as if it was made of straw instead of heavy wood. The girl lying on it squeaked and scrambled off.

"Hey," said Uzumaki, suddenly morphing out of his happy-go-lucky, hands-knitted-behind-his-head stance and lifting his ANBU badge. The movement conveniently, Sakura noted with grudging respect, lifted the side of his suit jacket to reveal the gun on his belt. "I'm ANBU. We're just here to ask a few questions."

The tense silence staked on for a moment longer.

Then Akimichi grunted and seated himself. The motion and conversations in the room resumed.

Uzumaki slipped his badge back inside his jacket and glanced at Sakura with a flick of his eyes that clearly said she should stay behind him. Sakura pretended not to understand and strode toward Akimichi without waiting for him.

"Fat," spat Akimichi in Japanese when she stopped in front of his table. He gestured down at himself. His clothes were long-sleeved and fitted closely enough to show off a trim frame. "Does any of this look fat to you?"

Sakura said nothing, although she was sure that the reason he was wearing long sleeves even in the summer heat was because post-bypass weight loss like his tended to leave folds of epidermis hanging from the limbs and abdomen.

Instead, her eyes across the girls – for that was what they were, she realized. Girls, not women. Some of them even looked younger than Yamanaka. The expressions on their faces reminded her of ones she had seen on women in Sand Country, pinched beneath their head-garbs as they huddled next to bombed dwellings that were slowly crumbling back into the desert. It was a dull look, as though their existences couldn't get any worse, so they didn't really care what happened to them.

"I said, do I LOOK fat?" demanded the man. His hand reached to the nape of the neck of the dark-haired girl sitting next to him, sifting up through her hair and gripping the back of her head.

"No trouble here, Akimichi-san." A voice speaking in badly mangled Japanese, pronouncing the silent i's and u's, came from behind Sakura.

Sakura turned and saw Uzumaki. His hand on the gun at his belt, he looked dead serious.

Especially in contrast to Akimichi, who was now snorting with laughter. "Was what supposed to be Japanese?"

"Yeah, I know I suck at it, so either you can speak Common, or Dr. Haruno here can translate for me." Uzumaki's hard expression didn't change.

"My place, we will speak my language," rumbled Akimichi, serious again. "Let me hear your voice, wench. We'll see if your voice is prettier than your body."

The skin around Sakura's eyes tightened. Her fists clenched, but Uzumaki spoke quietly at her shoulder.

"Ask him about Nara."

"We're looking for information about a drug dealer named Nara Shikamaru," Sakura said. "What can you tell us about him?"

Akimichi laughed. "You think I know anything about the street rats who sell in my district? There are hundreds of those bastards."

Knowing now that Uzumaki understood what was being said, Sakura pressed on without translating. "Surely you have records somewhere of who takes your drugs to sell."

"My drugs?" repeated Akimichi, twisting the girl's hair tightly around his fingers.

"No games," said Uzumaki, this time in Common, as Sakura translated. "We're not the Narc Squad. All we want is information about Nara. We're not trying to bring down your organization."

Sakura stopped translating in the middle of this, flicking Uzumaki an angry look. Of course they wanted to bring down his organization!

Akimichi eyed them for a moment. Then he raised his voice. "Kabuto!"

"I am coming, Akimichi-sama."

The calm voice came from behind Sakura. She stepped backward, almost into Uzumaki, as a gray-haired man – probably no older than thirty, despite his hair color, she thought, watching his easy movements – brushed past her. He had a tray in one hand, a glass of water in the other.

"It's time for your medicine, Akimichi-sama," he said, giving Naruto and Sakura an unperturbed, appraising sweep of his eyes as he set the tray in front of Akimichi.

Sakura leaned forward to see what pills were on the tray – the bastard probably had a painkiller addiction – but Akimichi already had them in his fist, his throat bobbing as he swallowed before she could glimpse more than a flash of color.

Akimichi smacked his lips, and one of the girls wiped the water dribbling down his chin with her fingers.

"Kabuto," said the crime boss then, grinning at Sakura's gritted teeth. "Do we have a druggie named Nara?"

Kabuto reached into his lumpy gray vest and withdrew a thick pack of what looked to be playing cards on a metal ring. He looked through them for a moment, paused, and, clicking his tongue, leaned over to say something to Akimichi.

"I have nothing to hide," grumbled Akimichi, never moving his eyes from Sakura's. "Tell them."

Kabuto turned, clasping his hands behind his back, and spoke to Naruto and Sakura in clear, precise Common. "Nara Shikamaru has sold drugs for our group in the past. We recently discovered, however, that he had been charging customers more than we allow our dealers to charge and siphoning off the extra money for himself."

"Cheeky of him," said Uzumaki, his eyes flicking to Akimichi, who appeared to have lost interest in the conversation. He was tugging two of the girls down to him by their long hair. "What'd you do to him when you found out?"

"Dismissed him, of course," said Kabuto, raising his brows above his spectacles as though surprised that the agent had even had to ask.

"Dismissed him, as in…?"

"Fire, let go, gave the pink slip," elaborated Kabuto. He cocked his head. "Why the questions, Agent? Was Mr. Nara involved in something illegal?"

"When did you dismiss him?"

Kabuto paused, as though to express his displeasure that Naruto had ignored his question. "I would say four, five weeks ago."

"Did he turn violent when you dismissed him?"

"Mr. Nara was a rather intelligent man, Agent." Kabuto let his eyes wander around the room, lingering on the tattoo-faced man near the door. "He knew better than to…dispute our decision. Once again, may I ask what this is about?"

"Well, since you're the one who brought up your enforcers…" Uzumaki shrugged. "We've found Mr. Nara's body. He was clearly a victim of some foul play. So you understand why I'm wondering what Mr. Akimichi over there had to do with it."

"As Akimichi-sama has told you, he was not personally acquainted with Nara," said Kabuto almost primly.

"Then should I be asking what _you _had to do with Nara's murder, Mr. Kabuto?"

"You should be asking me when you can call my lawyer for an appointment, Agent," said Kabuto. "Please do not let the door hit you on your way out."

"If either you or Akimichi-_sama_ leave the district, you will be tracked down and arrested for obstruction of justice," said Uzumaki. He was smiling, but his voice was cold. "Thanks for your time."

Sakura, glancing one last time at Akimichi's booth, turned to follow Uzumaki to the exit.

Abruptly, she sensed a breath of air against the back of her sweat-dampened shirt.

She pivoted, caught the arm that was reaching for her ponytail, and flipped it and its owner neatly over her back.

The canine-toothed man slammed into the floor at her feet and blinked up at the ceiling, dazed.

Then his eyes refocused, and he smirked up at her. "Knew I smelled it on you. You're a fighter."

"And you're scum," said Sakura, not returning the smile.

"What the hell?" Uzumaki pushed himself between Sakura and the man. "Akimichi, keep your people in line!"

Where he was leaning over and saying something Akimichi, Kabuto glanced over at them, unconcerned. "Kiba is a lone wolf," he said carelessly. "You may arrest him if you like."

Then he turned back to Akimichi.

-

Her mind clouded with thoughts of those girls with Akimichi, Sakura just followed Uzumaki back to the SUV instead of striding ahead of him like she would have stubbornly done otherwise.

Maybe the worst feeling was knowing how easily she could have been one of them. She had risked her life by enlisting in Fire Country's army after high school, but even if she had died, it would have been better than being one of Akimichi's _distractions_.

Uzumaki was saying something. Sakura forced herself to tune back in.

"…if it'd just been that Akimichi meathead, then yeah, maybe. But a sharp guy like that Kabuto doesn't seem like he'd let a body get found in plain sight when the Akimichi group has such an obvious motive to murder him."

"Unless he thought there was no way to trace the body," said Sakura. She was used to people being unfamiliar with just how much information forensic scientists could get from a mangled, half-rotted body. "After all, the whole point of killing him wouldn't be to get revenge so much as to send a warning to the other drug dealers: do the same thing Nara did, and you'll end up the way he did. If no one found Nara's body, no one would get the message."

"Not necessarily," said Uzumaki. "In circles like that, the guy's disappearance is enough. People don't have to stretch their imaginations too far to figure out what happened to a guy who stole from the Akimichi group."

"Whatever," said Sakura. Speculating on motive and intention made her impatient; it wasn't as though there was even any way to prove any of it. And whether Akimichi had murdered Nara or not, he was still a bastard that needed to be castrated.

She clenched her fists, glaring out the window as her stomach twisted. "Those girls…"

She didn't realize that she had spoken out loud until Uzumaki said, "Haruno, it's not their fault."

His hand came up to rest on her headrest as he looked behind them to reverse out of the parking space. "The kids here get trapped, no one takes care of them–"

"I know it's not their fault," Sakura snapped. Could he think her capable of at least _some_ compassion? "I told you I grew up here, you don't need to preach to me about how things are."

"Well, no offense, but it doesn't seem like you suffered all that much to me," retorted Uzumaki, "since you're high and mighty enough to look down on everyone."

Sakura's hand shot out and flipped on the blinker. "Pull over."

"What? It's the – "

"I'm. Getting. Out of. The. Car. Pull over."

"Haruno. Don't be stupid – "

"I have a PhD!" Sakura shouted. "You can't call me stupid!"

"Fine, I'll call you Dr. Obvious!"

Sakura let out a screech of infuriated frustration. "I'm going to punch you!"

"Do it, then!"

"Pull over first!"

Uzumaki's only response was to press the accelerator.

Sakura couldn't believe him. Or herself. How had she gotten herself into this situation? Arguing like a grade schooler – she hadn't even argued like this when she _was_ a grade schooler, she'd been too mature! She made an angry noise and crossed her arms over her chest, yanking her head around to glare out the window.

Barely a second later, she was whipping back around again to see why Uzumaki had just let out a pleased sigh.

"Aw," he said, rolling his shoulder and leaning against his window, only one hand on the steering wheel. "That felt good. Thanks."

Sakura stared at him. Her bangs fell into her face, and she pushed them out of the way. "What the hell are you talking about?"

"The arguing." He looked over at her; his eyebrows flew up as though shocked by the confused, angry expression still on her face. "What, it didn't make you feel better?"

"How is being insulted supposed to make me feel better?" said Sakura icily.

"It's not the _being_ insulted, it's the insult_ing_," corrected Uzumaki. "It gets the bad energy out. My brother and I always used to do it. He got frustrated all the time, and he'd just swallow it all down and get emotionally constipated, so I had to get it out of him somehow."

Sakura stared at him. Part of her was wrinkling her nose as the words _emotionally constipated_ but the rest of her was feeling annoyance that Uzumaki was right. She did feel better. The nausea splashing in her stomach had calmed.

"In other words, you're saying you just manipulated me."

Uzumaki just grinned at her in that way that had thus far never failed to make a flush begin on her neck. "In other words, you're saying it worked."

Sakura made a sound and recrossed her arms, looking out the window again.

"You know," said Uzumaki after a while. "For a guy who said you were ugly, Akimichi sure didn't stop staring at you."

Sakura rolled her eyes his way. "What do you want me to say to that?"

"Eh…" Uzumaki shrugged. "Don't know, I guess. I was just saying…you're not ugly, okay?"

Sakura felt the capillaries on the back of her neck dilate with heat even as she saw the tips of Uzumaki's ears turn pink beneath his unruly blond hair.

Dryly, she said, "I'm not an insecure teenager, but thanks for the compliment."

* * *

**A/N:** I'd greatly appreciate thoughts of how (or if) Sakura and Naruto's characters are developing. I also really love speculations on what you guys think is going to happen.


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